Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Bleeding Cash With Google AdWords

I see this too frequently to think of it as a fluke; clients using extremely general keywords for programs and then spending their whole budget on a term like gas or American sound. Wow, Google is really getting rich at the expense of some clients who are tickled to death at the volume of totally untargeted clicks they are getting.

I have now seen two clients in less than seven days who were spending $100 to $175 per day and did not have website statistics or AdWords conversion tracking set up! If you are going to spend serious money on AdWords, you must make Google accountable by having metrics to determine the program’s success in place. You should be using Urchin or at the minimum Google Analytics – AWStats doesn’t cut it! You should have conversion tracking installed and a scripted contact form that has a thank you page (not a return to the same form page) so that you can install the AdWords script in the code of the thank you page to be able to track micro-conversions or completions of your lead form.

Google AdWords can really work for some businesses, but you need to be a smart consumer or Google will allow you to spend and spend and spend and spend without any conscience of your real success or lack thereof.

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Jeremy Zawodny Leaves Yahoo and So The Exodus Starts

If you don’t know who Jeremy Zawodny is, he is Yahoo’s mouthpiece to the professional world of webmasters much in the sense that Matt Cutts is for Google. Jeremy is a search engineer and Yahoo uses him to disseminate information and his blog allows professionals such as myself to get an inside picture on what is happening with Yahoo.

Well, it is news that he is leaving Yahoo after 8 years. I didn’t expect otherwise. His blog has been very somber lately and he had written recently in angst about the Microsoft Yahoo bid. After having been in the corporate world myself and having a top management change affect my job drastically, sometimes quality people need to jump ship before new management puts the hammer down and squelches their creativity or changes the corporate culture to an unworkable model where they are no longer welcome. Clearly such is the case for Jeremy.

With all the changes Yahoo has experienced in the last several months, it is very hard to think that it is really business as us usual. I expect there will be other high level team members that will take their own exodus in the weeks to come leaving Yahoo ripe for the picking. Microsoft would be very foolish to not be looking carefully at acquisition of Yahoo.

 

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Viral Marketing Using Video

I have a friend who pointed me to this short video and I thought it was interesting to point to you on how others are creatively marketing their business.

The woman in the video is a face reader. She uses an ancient Chinese art to identify things about you from your face. She was consulting with my friend to get more activity for her business. My friend recommended that she show people what she does on a video. She went to Facebook and at random chose people to give reading too. She then posted the video on Facebook, YouTube and on the site below. Buzz was created which has driven traffic to her business in a highly creative way.

Way to go! This was a great idea to get out what she does, offer something free to others, and then market herself doing it.

 

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Google’s Devaluation of Link Programs

I follow a number of blogs and newsletters focused on search engine optimization techniques. It continues to amaze me when supposed experts talk about link programs and their value in getting placement on Google. If they had read Google’s patent disclosure from last year they would know that they need to be rethinking link campaigns.

Right now I am watching a client and analyzing the techniques that we are using for organic improvement on Google. The days of using link software are gone, as Google will ding you for linking to poor quality sites. In fact before you link to anyone, you should evaluate their site for how it works with your content, their pagerank, and the actual placement of your link. Getting a link for the sake of just a link is actually now a very bad strategy to take when you are focused on Google placement.

We know that linking from blogs doesn’t work anymore as all the main platforms now insert a no follow tag in the link, some forums still have a follow property in their links, and so some forums can still be good for you to post and link back to your website and blog, but not all.

We are also evaluating feature article writing as a way to get quality inbound links, and so far have found that although this tactic generates an abundance of links, but that Google is smart enough to net them out when determining organic ranking. There is some buzz in the marketplace that  it may take 90 days for Google to add the links to the site’s organic ranking, but to me from what I have seen so far this sounds like an apology for non-performance. I am watching two situations very carefully using feature articles for link generation and as soon as I can ascertain if this is a workable strategy I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, be very suspicious of webmasters and SEO firms that try to rope you in with link building programs, you may be paying for a strategy that Google has devalued.