What is the best way to name a URL on a site?

The current best practice for naming a URL is to separate the words by hyphens. This helps the crawlers to read each word separately, and will help to increase the SEO for your targeted keywords. When Google offers guidelines it’s best to pay attention!

How NOT to name a URL:

• Don’t separate your URL keywords with spaces
• Don’t separate your URL keywords with plus “+” signs
• Don’t separate your URL keywords with underscores “_”

Best Practices to naming URLs:

• Do separate most important keywords with hyphens “-”
• Use no more than 3 hyphens, so you don’t appear to be spamming the SE’s
• Use the most important keywords only, skip the articles (and, the, but, with)

These simple guidelines should help to give a slight boost to some of your pages! Have fun SEO’ing

Shanee
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Hello out there to all of my fellow iPhone fans!

I have to admit that I was a little behind the times when it comes to smart phones. I’ve never owed a cell phone that did more than answer calls — no text messaging, no camera, nothing. So, imagine my fascination when making the giant leap to the best-of-the-best with the iPhone. I love being able to check and answer emails remotely, but I also love the easy-to-use interface. I was immediately hooked!

Then, Apple allows you to have a variety of applications and games for the iPhone for FREE. I have also become addicted to checking out the “Top 100 Free Apps” page to see what’s the newest, most popular apps each day. My favorites so far are Pandora and Aurora Feint (very addicting).

One more thing that I couldn’t predict — My 3-year old is also ADDICTED to this thing. I’ve downloaded tons of the simple free games, and she can spend hours (if allowed) playing on this thing!

All I can say is that I’m in LOVE, and iPhone definitely beats the Blackberry!

What do you think?

Shanee

Any time that you are spending your own or someone else’s money on a PPC advertisement, you want to be able to *show* what you got for it, right? You try to develop a clever way of demonstrating how the advertising spend brought ‘x’ number of visitors to their site, which resulted in ‘y’ number of leads and ‘z’ dollars in revenue. Without true reporting and ROI measurements, you are honestly just guessing and spending money in a vacuum.

Google tries to help its advertisers with Google Adwords Conversion Tracking. If you are new to PPC management, and you read about conversion tracking, it can seem confusing and overwhelming. But, let me tell you that it is essential to building and maintaining a successful campaign. As a company or a small business owner, if you take a look at that section, and your head starts to spin, just call your web master or your ppc manager and have them remedy this for you!

Why is Conversion Tracking important?
On the big picture level, it allows you to combine with your other PPC statistics, another statistic which shows which of your campaigns are converting to leads or sales. So, right away, you know which campaigns are performing better for you — Which are spending your dollars more efficiently.

Then, you can also drill down into the detail — This is the part that I love. With conversion statistics, I can see which KEYWORDS are converting best, which SITES on the Content Network convert the best, which PLACEMENTS convert the best, etc. Then, you are able to start whittling down the “bad” and trying to replace it with more stuff that looks like the “good.” Over a short time, conversion tracking will increase your click-through rates (CTRs) and send you more conversions (leads and sales) — Since you will be optimizing for what is converting best, not what is generating the most clicks/traffic.

Without Conversion Tracking, I cannot answer these questions:
“What can we do to increase our revenue from PPC?”
“What are our best keywords in AdWords for Product A?”
“What Placements Offer the Best bang for the buck?”
“Does the Content Network work for us?”

Again, in most cases, installing conversion tracking takes less than 5 minutes for your web editor or web master. It is easier than it looks, and is well worth digging into. Find a way to have it added to your program! This is a cheap (read: free) way your AdWords experts can help you get closer to your success goals. Ask your PPC advertising firm today if you are using this properly.

And, let me know if you have questions. We’re here to help.

Shanee

What to do with all of those old pages? Whatever you do, don’t delete them. In most cases there is a better solution — 301 Redirect, otherwise known as a “Google-Friendly” redirect.

Do a Google search and you’ll find tons of information on this topic. But, clients still ask “Why?” Here’s my explanation (and this analogy is a bit of a stretch). We all work very hard to have our current content and pages ranked and indexed. Picture climbing a very, very tall mountain — Let’s say Everest. Each new page starts at Base Camp 0 - no associated page rank. Older pages, depending on many ranking factors, could be located anywhere between base camp and the summit. When you redirect the old page to the new page, you give the new page a leg up, based on the elder’s position. So, if you can get a head start, why wouldn’t you??

A second analogy (again, a stretch): Think of heading on a long journey — Maybe driving cross-country, starting in California. You reach Texas and realized that you missed the exit to the Alamo. Do you A, return to California and begin your trip again? Or, B, make a U-turn and quickly get back on track? That’s what I thought!

There are many other reasons for creating redirects, especially if you have a large or popular site — Links! All cross-links and backlinks will become broken if you delete the old page. All of the “link” power will be transferred to the new URL if you use the proper redirect practice.

Finally, if you can possibly make an update to an existing page, without changing the URL, this is the best practice! No need to go creating new pages and re-directs when simple updates to existing pages can be made.

So, what are your common client questions? What analogies do you use to explain the concepts?

Shanee K.

So, I’ve seriously been considering switching from traditional (HD cable) to a streaming video service like Hulu. Check it out! This thing is pretty cool. You can watch all (actually, most) of your favorite shows online without the hefty price of the cable bill. I spent a good portion of my day yesterday exploring this… Here are my findings.

It’s pretty cool, but it’s not ready for prime time yet! Maybe if you are an adult with no kids, you could pull it off. All of your favorite TV shows are likely to be there (and some of your favorite oldies).

Here are my current constraints:
1. No kid/small child shows: We NEED PBS, Disney Channel, and Noggin to survive the mornings around here.
2. Flash 9 - My Playstation 3 does not support Flash 9 yet, so the site doesn’t work as well as it should (trying to play on my main TV).
3. Soap Operas and Daytime TV - I need my soaps, Dr. Phil, The View, etc before I can make the leap.
4. Premium Channel Shows - Like Dexter on Showtime, etc.

The company has only been around for a little over a year, and they’ve got a HUGE amount of content. It’s only a matter of time, and I do believe that this is the way of the future. I hope that it hurries up so I can save that $100/month on my cable bill!

Anyone know of any competitive services? Anyone else moving this direction?

Shanee K.

If you think that PPC search marketing is just for advertising and driving traffic to your site, then you are mistaken! At our PPC firm we also believe that this is also a great way to test landing page concepts and ideas in a short period of time, with a relatively small budget. Talk to your Pay Per Click management company about running a series of tests on your site to test your new ideas.

Have you ever wondered:
Will an embedded, fresh video help to increase conversions?
Will an on-page form double the leads from the page vs. adding and extra “click” to reach the form?
Will adding a related and attractive graphic to a page decrease the bounce rate (while increasing conversions)?

All of these questions can easily be answered and PROVEN by setting up an A/B split test with PPC advertising. Take one of your PPC themes (ad groups), and one set of keywords, with identical ad copy, you rotate traffic equally between two test pages (A/B). A reasonable budget would be $20-$50/day for a 1 to 2 week period. At the end of the test period, you will have a concrete answer as to whether there is a difference in the conversion rate for either page.

Do you ever receive push-back from management or other departments regarding landing page Best Practices, or changes that you want to institute? Well, the PPC A/B split test is your answer. We recently were able to show one of our clients that by shortening the copy (making it more focused and relevant) and creating on on-page form, this new “test” page converted 3:1 over their “old” page.

Wow! A 200% improvement, proven and learned for less than $500 can now be applied to all other product pages. Can’t argue with that!

How have you used PPC marketing, other than simply driving traffic?

Shanee K.

Hello, World,

This would be our first, our premiere blog post! We are an SEO consulting firm and PPC management agency (we also handle traditional print marketing, but online stuff seems to be “all the rage” these days). I am Shanee Kirk, and I’ve been a marketer for over 10 years now. I began consulting about 5 years ago, and I love it! The variety of work is fun and exciting. It’s a fun challenge to see different clients with their varying goals and problems, and help each of them to succeed.

Tonight, I’m thinking (read: I am annoyed) about some changes that Google recently made to the AdWords PPC management program. It’s really a challenge for PPC managers and PPC companies to keep up with the rapid fire releases and updates that Google regularly (and unexpectedly) releases. And, the changes aren’t always good!

So, I’m curious if Google Beta tested their new summary pages and screens or if they just decided that this was the new and better way to go? Back in the olden days, you used to be able to dig into a campaign, and edit the bids for all of the ad groups at once. Granted, you can still do this, but the “new and improved” summary page doesn’t split the clicks/cost for search vs content!! You can still individually change the bids, but you can not see the stats or data that would aid you in those decisions. This means that you have to click into each individual ad group, and spend a lot more time to manage those bids.

If Google is out there listening, please give us more, not less, with these new releases!

Has anyone noticed a decline in clicks/impressions from the old, stand-alone placement ad campaigns??

Shanee

And, ps — Could you please put position preferences at the campaign level?

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