The following is a type of match that less than 1% of all advertisers are familiar with.

Quick Definition: Negative embedded match gives an advertiser the ability to show every variation of a keyword, except for the keyword.

What does this mean?

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate”

This will allow me to show up for “Real Estate San Francisco”, “San Francisco Real Estate Today”, “Francisco Real San Estate” but not “San Francisco Real Estate”

Why is this useful for search engine marketers?

1. Negative embedded match allows you control over conflicts between multiple keywords (with multiple match types) that are all eligible for triggering potential ads.  – This is critical if you are running multiple keyword match types in various AdWords accounts.

Example: Account 1 has only broad keywords while Account 2 has the same exact keywords but in exact match. In this example Account 1 would be implementing negative embedded match.

2)  Allows ads not to be displayed for keywords that produce low return on investments, but yet appear for specific keyword variations.

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate” derives a conversion rate of 1%, while variations such as “Cheap San Francisco Real Estate” or “San Francisco Real Estate Companies” produce 5% conversion rates. With endless variations of “San Francisco Real Estate” it is most efficient to run negative embedded match.

How does this work?

Let’s use the example of just “real estate” this time.  We are a national chain that sells real estate, however the keyword “real estate” brings in very little conversions, or conversions at an unaffordable price-point.  We know that three word combinations and four word combinations (“San Francisco real estate”, “Denver real estate”, “real estate in San Diego”) have excellent ROIs.

In our example we would insert –[real estate] into our ad group to appear for all variations except “real estate” when someone searches Google.

Effective search marketing requires more and more control over keywords.

By using negative embedded matching we can pull search query reports to see what variations users typed into Google and which of keywords provide the highest return on investment.

If your vertical contains high traffic and there is budget for keyword testing, I strongly encourage implementing negative embedded matching to hunt the long-tail of effective keywords.

Happy Hunting,
Nicholas Abramovic

Recently I had a customer who had many of their pages missing from the Google index, including the home page and all other top level pages.  The home page was indexed, but there was no cache for it, and the title and snippet were from some other source, not the current home page.  It appeared that somehow their pages were being ignored by Google, or they had incurred some kind of penalty.  The pages were indexed fine by Yahoo and MSN, so this was something specific to Google.

We looked carefully at many things to find the problem, including robots.txt, use of redirects on the root URL, XML site map files, linking, use of session IDs, etc etc.  Finally, we isolated the problem: a piece of JavaScript code that conditionally redirected the user to a test page.  Normally the JavaScript variable would not trigger this redirection, but it appears Google did not trust the code, and interpreted this as a cloaking/spam technique where  users are redirected to a different page and do not see what the search engines see.

The code was something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var test=”yes”;
if (test!= “yes”) {
document.write(”<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0;URL=http://www.mysite.com/testing/’ />”); }
</script>

This code was was on all pages that were not indexed, and not present on those pages that were indexed.  When we removed this code, the pages started to get back into the index within hours, and already over 1,500 pages have been added to the index.   Thus it was obvious this was the culprit, even though this was just an innocent way of making it easy to show a test page with a simple variable change.

Normally you would not expect a search engine, even Google, to  follow this code.  It is a meta refresh dynamically written by a JavaScript document.write() command.  However, Google spam filters look for “tricky” spam techniques, and they obviously evaluated this code, and did not trust the conditional check on the “test” variable.  I think what happened was that they always followed the meta refresh and indexed that page instead of each original page.  Ouch!

Google has been very clear that their algorithms look for spam techniques that try to fool them.  For example, see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/

I suspect there are many other ways to get your pages banned or penalized by search engines.  It appears that Google is using some very sophisticated techniques, though not quite sophisticated enough in our case!

So, if your pages are missing or removed from search engine indexes, look carefully at any areas where you have JavaScript-controlled redirects, meta refresh commands or other techniques that might be interpreted as spam attempts.

John Erickson
LeadQual

Getting your news article posted on Google News or Yahoo News can be a big boon for gaining website visitors. In one day you could potentially get thousands of visitors coming to your site for the first time. Yahoo News is the most popular news aggregator in terms of usage. Google News hasn’t picked up such a following yet but it serves the results with a similar type of algorithm like its normal search counterpart. It serves news it deems to be relevant and from sites that it deems to have authority.

You can always go through a PR firm which will help get your articles shown on these sites, but did you know you can directly submit them to the engines yourself? If you’d like to get your article listed on Google News, you need to go ahead and submit your site or blog directly to Google News or Yahoo News. The catch is that your website will be reviewed and either accepted or rejected depending on several factors.

Originality & Validity
1. Is the content original or just rewritten news found anywhere on the web?
2. Organization Information
3. Author Information, Multiple Authors is better
4. Transparency - Name of Author in each post
5. Focus of the site (is it a specific news category, segment or industry) and its relevancy?
6. Frequency of Articles (should have multiple posts per day)
7. Look and Feel of site - is it like a news site? Are there images and videos?
8. Is there advertising on the site? (a sign of traffic volume)

URLs
9. URL for each article must be static
10. URL for each article must have a unique number consisting of at least 3 digits (this has been debated, but always safer to do)

Others
11. Site Load Speed

To further enhance your case you can provide
1. Statistics
2. Historical Background of site
3. List of Awards
4. Talk about Editors and Authors
5. Who links to your site

Here is where you can submit them.
Google News
Yahoo News

Hope this helps!

Please feel free to comment with thoughts, suggestions and questions.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google Quality Score and Minimum CPC

Word is spreading that Google, who is well known for their incredible line up of perks, is cutting back their budget on their culinary program. Among several things being cut from the program the largest hit will be the elimination of free dinners.

It has been estimated that Google spends anywhere from $20-$30 a day per employee. about $5000-$7,500K per Google employee which results in about $50-$72 Million a year just on providing free food for their employees. The headquarters in Mountain view alone holds 8,000+ employees.

Google’s founders have always communicated their commitment to providing great perks for their employees. The only sign of breakage from this commitment was the rumor that Sergey Brin complained about employees’ sense of entitlement to “bottled water and M&Ms”. Google has lost a lot of their chef’s to other companies such as facebook and has been supposedly understaffed.

What will this mean for Google’s culture and the sustainability of future perks?

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google is changing the way they measure your Quality Score. Though Google uses an auction bid type system for its Adwords management, much of your position ranking is currently determined by how relevant Google deems your structure, ad, keyword and landingpages are with one another. Then it takes that score, factors in your account history, click through rate and many other factors and this final “score” is often called “Quality Score” or “index”. If this Quality score is too low, Google will raise the minimum bid required to show your ad. This is how more established players who have good history and have properly structured and optimized accounts can out position you with a $0.10 bid while you may be unable to show your ad even at a $2 bid.

The news out of Google is that in the next few days, the Quality Score, which used to be static and by keyword, will now be calculated at the time of each query.
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A little known tactic with Dynamic Keyword Insertion (the “bracket trick”) is placing keywords into your destination URLs.

Most Internet marketers just implement the bracket trick in their headline or description line (see below example)

{KeyWord:Lead Generation Marketing}
Get ROI focused SEM PPC Management.
We Share All Our Strategies & Data!
www.LeadQual.com/Leads

You can also use the bracket trick for your destination URLs: http://leadqual.com/?keyword={keyword}

By implementing the above tactic, you can use your web logs and analytics to record which keywords generated the most leads for you by tracking referring URLs.

Why is this useful? Conversion tracking is not 100%. MSN can sometimes inflate your numbers by 4 fold. Also, there are situations where Google, Yahoo or MSN are just not able to track your conversions. What is an ROI-focused marketer to do? By dynamically inserting your keyword into the destination URL you have just greatly increased the likelihood of properly tracking the truest number of conversions. Now, just add a distinct variable for your adgroups and you no longer need to rely on Google for conversion tracking.

Rock On,
Nicholas Abramovic

Nicholas prefers playing {KeyWord:FoosBall} over blogging, but just thought you should know about a useful way of implementing DKI.

Source: Nielsen Online

Google continues to grow both in searches in and in market share. In July Google’s searches increased 16% over last year. Yahoo’s searches decreased 11 percent while Microsoft searches dropped 10%. Ask.com which has shifted its focus to targeting soccer moms and women grew 13% for 2% of the market share. Microsoft however had made a lot of gains in the past few months by providing monetary incentives to searchers for using their live.com search engine. It has brought many users to their site and increased their market share.

However Google owns 60 percent of the 8 billion searches and continues to own this market by a large lead. The industry as a total increased 3 percent in terms of total searches.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

There is a lot of talk going around that Yahoo! will soon reveal it’s new display ad management system. This platform was formerly known as “Amp” and is expected to help them increase their revenue and growth projection. This new management system should start to rollout this quarter.

Yahoo! has been working to build itself as a management system that would easily enable to advertisers, publishers, and agencies to buy and sell hundreds of relevant ad space without the need of speaking to a Yahoo rep on the phone. Best of all this system is expected to be free unlike many of their ad management software competitors. One unique aspect about this new management system is that it would enable publishing partners to sell inventory on Yahoo! properties. “Inside of the company, the reason the confidence level is so high is we’re not just building a piece of software to be innovative. We are potentially the biggest customer of the software” said Mike Walrath, senior vice president of Yahoo!’s advertiser marketplace.” Word is that the initial feedback from partners have been very positive.

Google with its acquisition of DoubleClick is expected to release of integrated features in the near future. DoubleClick current is a paid management system.

This system was supposed to be released earlier, but was delayed when the Adam Hyder, the head of engineering for this project left for a different company.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

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