Introduction to Google AdWords Auction
BPOVIA takes AdWords bids very seriously and aims at implementing AdWords strategies in the most cost-effective way, in order to achieve this goal, we firstly need to know how Google AdWords auction works, here we would like to share our ideas and knowledge about AdWords auction with the world, hopefully this information to help you, if you have any thoughts on this, please feel free to leave your comments.
According to Google, every time a user enters a search query, an auction is run, the result of the auction is an ads list in certain order.
First of all, let’s take a look at an example:
This is a very simple model in which 4 advertisers are included, let name them as Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, their max bid goes down from $4 to $1 sequentially. Assume that a user’s search query in Google could trigger their ads to appear, however, the actual price they pay will not be their max bids, as you see, the advertiser only need to pay the max bid of the next advertiser.
However, in real AdWrods mechanism, any ad’s position is not simply determined by how much you bid, here we need to introduce another very important factor Quality Score, Quality Score is a number between 1 and 10 which is used by Google to determine your ad position. We already know that Quality Score is decided by 3 factors, they are CTR, Relevance and Landing Page Quality, according to the pie graph above, you may notice that Google regards CTR as the most important, then Relevance, then Landing Page Quality.
Now let’s add Quality Score to our previous simple example and make it a little more like real campaign. When the Max Bid times the Quality Score, we achieve another important number, say Ad Rank, the more Ad Rank you an advertiser gets, the higher his or her ad can rank. In this case, Blue with Max Bid $2 and Quality Score 6 receives the highest Ad Rank 12, then Green’s 9 and Yellow’s 8, as for Red, although he has the maximum bid in this case, due to his low performance in Quality Score (1), his ad fails to appear.
Then how much does Google charge each advertiser when uses click on his or her ad, see the chart below:
- P1 = The actual CPC Advertiser 1 will be charged by Google
- Q1 = The Quality Score of Advertiser 1′s ad
- B2 = The maximum bid of Advertiser 2
- Q2 = The Quality Score of Advertiser 2′s ad
Now we have to introduce an equation from Google,
- P1Q1=B2Q2
So then
- P1=B2Q2/Q1
Say the actual CPC of an advertiser is the amount that his/her next-rank advertiser’s Ad Rank divided by his/her Quality Score. In our case, we know that finally Blue will be charged $1.5 and Green $2.67, you may notice that high rank doesn’t mean high price, Google uses this system to award advertisers who have a higher quality score.
Based on this, we can figure out a more efficient PPC campaign, we will talk about this in our next post.
Tweet to Bookmark
Posted by Dolphin in Social Media on August 23, 2010
A couple days ago, Twitter officially launches “Tweet Button”, which enables both web masters and visitors to enjoy a more convenient way of sharing valuable and interesting stories.
To enable this feature, you should firstly go to Share Bookmarklet. In the Getting the Bookmarklet section, you could find the “Share On Twitter” button, what you should do is drag it to your browser’s bookmark bar, just as shown in the picture below.
Then every time when you come across an interesting web page or whatever, you can simply click on the button and a window would pop out. Firstly, you should sign into your Twitter account, after that, you may notice that Twitter has used her official URL shortener to shorten your current page, however, you should type something to refine what you tweet, see the picture below, in this case, we may type BPOVIA Won 2010 IAOP Rising Star Award before the URL and you may add #BPOVIA as the end tag. Then “Tweet” it.
What do you think about this? Really cool, isn’t it? Now you are able to tweet whatever you like, in this way, Twitter could serve as a really cool bookmark tool. The refining text could be regarded as the description, and the # content could be the tag compared with the one used in traditional bookmark tool. Also, you can later add these bookmarks as your favorites, which would make it much easier for you to manage them and distinguish them from your normal tweets, or even you can sign up a new Twitter account specially used for bookmarking, you may choose to prevent your tweets if you like your privacy.
Explanation for GoDaddy’s Top 10 SEO Checklist
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on August 8, 2010
We already know it’s important to add meaningful and unique meta tags onto the website, but how they look and perform on the search result list? Is there anything else we should pay attention to when doing internal optimization? Well, GoDaddy nowadays provides a Top 10 SEO Checklist on which it lists the most important 10 internal elements that should be optimized, here I would like to show you in a more detailed way of how to implement internal optimization based on GoDaddy’s instruction.
1. Proper Title Tags
The page title tag is one of the most important attributes on the page. It is the first thing that search engines show site visitors about your site, and it is the text of the link that site visitors click on when they visit your site from search engines. Most search engines place much more weight on the page title tag text than any other on page element.
- Page Title Length
Google shows the first 65 to 70 characters from your page title in their search results. You should be able to get your entire page title or almost your entire page title in 70 characters. If you run slightly past that you are fine, but the words near the start of your page title get more weighing placed on them than keywords at the end of the page title.
- Stop Words
Words that are common do not help search engines understand documents. Exceptionally common terms, such as the, are called stop words. While search engines index stop words, they are not typically used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.
2. Proper Description Tags
Many search engines will use the meta description as part of the page abstract if the exact search term that was searched for is found in the meta description tag. Additionally, it sometimes appears in search results if the search engine cannot extract meaningful content from the page copy or if the algorithm feels the meta description will provide a more useful presentation.
- Page Description Length
This tag should be between a sentence to a paragraph and should not appear keyword-stuffed. The text should read well to the human eye since this tag is still used in many search results pages. A good or bad description can be the difference between a click and being ignored. Google shows ~ 160 characters from the meta description tag in their search results.
3. Proper Keywords Tags
The meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the meta keywords tag itself is not used by many top SEO experts. Compared with adding meta keywords tags onto your page, we usually suggest that you focus more on the content of the page.
4. Proper Heading Tags
We usually suggest that people use heading tags to break the page into subgroups, only use one h1 tag per page and do not bold or emphasize it. It probably works best if it is slightly different than your page title.
Examples of subheadings can be as follows:
h2 (similar subtopic idea with some related keyword phrases in it)
h2 (another subtopic with some semantically related words)
h2 (Many subtopics do not have the same keywords as the page title and main headings)
Descriptive, reader-focused subheadings improve the usability of your website, both for search engines and human visitors.
5. Page Content
Page content is the major part of your website, after you structure your page into different subgroups, it’s time to add descriptive content. Usually, you should make your content interesting, just focus more on the visitors’ experience, at the same, you should make sure that your keywords should appear in the content, as for the keyword density, we don’t think good content would lack content, however, you should not make your content keyword-stuffed.
6. Proper Navigation
Again, visitors’ experience is one of the most important factors to increase your conversion rate, in order to achieve this goal, your website should firstly have a friendly navigation system. Do check if any of your web pages has dead internal or outbound links.
Some sites use JaveScript and other client-side navigation. Search engines struggle to follow things that happen on the client side (or in the browser). You can tell if a site’s navigation is client-side by viewing the source or by turning off JavaScript and active scripting and then reloading the document. We generally recommend staying away from JavaScript and client-side navigation. If you feel you must use it, make sure you add static text links to the bottom of your pages.
7. Proper Sitemap
It is also good idea to have a site map linked to from the home page that links to all major internal pages. The idea is to give search engine spider another route through your site and to give users a basic way to flow through your site if your navigation is broken or confusing. You can also use the sitemap to channel link authority and promote seasonal specials. The sitemap should be:
- Quick loading
- Light on graphics
- Overly simplistic
Search engines also creates an xml based sitemap protocol that could be used to help alert search engines to new content on your site and the relative importance of each page. However, it is important to note that actively linking within your main site structure and building inbound linkage data will carry far more weight in helping engines find and rank your content.
8. Controlled Crawling
You do not need to use a robots.txt file. By default, search engines will index your site. If you do create a robots.txt file, it goes in the root level of your domain using robots.txt as the file name.
This allows all robots to index everything:
- User-agent: *
- Disallow:
This disallow all robots to your site:
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /
You can also disallow a folder or a single file in the robots. txt file. This disallows a folder:
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /projects/
This disallows a file:
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /cheese/please.html
9. Duplicate Content/Tags
Well, I think we have been aware of this point, this article tells you something about it.
10. Word Density
First of all, you should keep you your content at a certain length, we think 300 to 700 words is a good option. Then, after you writing it, look back to see if there are any keywords in it. If you find 5 keywords in your 300-word article, it’s OK, if you find 50, you need to delete some of them because you content is keyword-stuffed. Write in a natural and reader-based way, just imagine you are going to write something about say trees, if you put 50 trees in your 300-word article, your teacher must don’t like it.
This is an article written for Yvonne, one of BPOVIA virtual assistants, she just has a client who received a Top 10 SEO Checklist from GoDaddy and wanted some explanation from our end.
To be Unique and Meaningful – BPOVIA On-page Optimization Guide
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on June 21, 2010
BPOVIA SEO Department has enjoyed her growth in reputation and authority in Internet Marketing field recently due to the hard and smart work of the staff members, BPOVIA is no longer merely a personal assistant service provider, BPOVIA‘s effective recommendations on customers’ websites have helped a lot of guys succeed online, BPOVIA would like to share some tips associated with Search Engine Optimization here, let’s get started with on-page optimization today.
There are many articles talking about on-page optimization, some of them even provide a checklist for people’s reference, it is obviously very practical and could be used as a quick-start tutorial for newcomers. Generally speaking, on-page optimization covers at least, but not limit to:
- URL
- Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- Header
- Keyword Density
- Image Title
- Image Alternative Tag
- Image Description
BPOVIA thinks that there must be existing some fundamental basics and principles that can be applied to all the above elements of on-page optimization, after studying a lot of websites, we finally discover the 2 features all successful websites share, that is, to be unique and meaningful in on-page optimization except for Meta Keywords (confirmed useless by Google) and Keyword Density (claimed not that important by many SEO experts).
Obviously search engines don’t like to index duplicate content, if a certain website is indexed by Google, there must be some unique features on the website. Some of BPOVIA‘s clients have no idea about the difference between a successful website and a mediocre one, so they sometimes just keep the entry title randomly, Welcome to Our Homepage, just like this. Actually this could be a very good title when all other webmasters include their brand names in the titles, however the truth is hundreds of thousands of people are using Welcome to Our Homepage as their homepage title, which means an unnecessarily fierce competition.
Some people do really put their brand names on the homepage and write descriptions for it, however, after doing this, they duplicate it to all pages, which divides the power of a creative title and description into different parts, all pages will sank in the search results. In order to reach certain goals, people sometimes insert keywords having nothing with the content into the titles, this will turn both search engines and visitors very confused about the topic that is being talked about and once Google finds that you are likely to spam anywhere, your website will be suffering severe penalty.
BPOVIA encourages her staff members to CREATE entries by themselves, and we believe that regarding blog promoting, creation is one thing while submission is another. If you are using WordPress for in stance and after you copy and paste your original content from Word, it’s time that you thought about how to explain it to search engines and it is time that on-page optimization functioned. It is said that Google uses over 200 signals to determine the ranking position, it is unpractical to learn all of them since the algorithm is always changing, but Google really does a good job in sharing some rooted tactics, on-page optimization is an important part. No matter when you are thinking about URL, title, meta description, meta keywords, keyword density, etc, you should always pay same attention just as you are creating an essay. To make every part of on-page optimization unique and meaningful may be the best explanation of a good on-page optimization strategy according to BPOVIA experience. For a homepage, a brand-based title is always much better than a generic one, a descriptive meta description is always cooler than Welcome to Homepage; for internal pages, a title-based static URL is always more effective than a number-stuffed one and a proper fixed keyword density is always more relevant than a non-keyword or keyword-stuffed one.
BPOVIA has concluded this rule from the her own experience and customers’ feedback, when you are doing on-page optimization, please make sure that each of them is both unique and meaningful.
BPOVIA Online Marketing and SEO Service
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on June 17, 2010
BPOVIA usually suggests that Search Engine Optimization is included in website design and maintenance service, because when we successfully construct a website, it is just a website hanging there. The issue left is how to activate it. Only when people visit the website, it can become alive and bring profit. People tend to use search engine to look for what they want, therefore it is very import to push your website to a higher rank in the relevant search results.
Here BPOVIA would like to share with the world how we usually do with BPOVIA Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
- Focus on ROI
Return on Investment, YES, BPOVIA takes it in high priority. As you see, we provide 4 packages, whose prices range from $499 to $1,499, we believe that you can always find the most suitable one for you. Every day customers from all over the world keep asking us to prepare successful SEO strategies for their websites, we need to evaluate them all and suggest good campaign.
Once upon a time, one of our clients from Canada wanted to promote his website on the internet and he needed our help. He wanted to sells his new book on the website and it seems that it was the only functionality of the website. The book is worth $10 each and he would like to try our Professional Package. We were shocked and we were not sure we could help sell 450 books in the first 3 months since the book was likely to be his autobiography. So we suggested he started from our Basic Package at the rate of $499 per month. The during the first 3 months, he successfully sold totally 320 books in the first 3 months. It is easy to calculate how much he own from his SEO package, if we suggested the Professional Package, I think he may suffer a loss because according to our evaluation criteria, he could only sell 300 or so books in the frist 3 months no matter which package he chose. We stopped our SEO campaign after 3 months and he kept earning money after that.
BPOVIA doesn’t want to see any of the customers to suffer a loss, so we always stay focus on what you can get from what you pay, say Return of Investment.
- Preliminary Week(s) for Business Understanding
BPOVIA SEO Department always takes at least 1 week to review our customers’ business, it is a very necessary step agreed by most of customers. SEO is a complex and long-term campaign and we should have a good start. Some of our clients’ businesses are really cool and complicated, sometimes we need to post entries to certain blogs or leave comments, which means that we should have a good knowledge of relevant businesses.
Also, during the preliminary week(s), we will analyze how competitors are working, with the help of SEO tools and resources, we would collect information about the campaigns of the competitors, we may follow some successful steps and avoid the mediocre ones. We usually do an SEO competitor analysis and submit it to our clients.
- Then It’s Time We Started
Take a look at BPOVIA Online Marketing & SEO, you will see the detailed service included in any package, our SEO packages cover Google Analytics Installation, Keyword & Analysis, Keyword Selection, On-page Optimization, Link Building, etc.
You choose our SEO package, you actually choose an integrated internet marketing package because apart from SEO campaign, we will also so loads of work associated with social media, including Forum Posts, Blog Posts, Social Network Setup and Maintenance.
- Communication with Our Customers
BPOVIA would like to provide weekly reports and weekly debriefs to our customers. We always think it is very important to know what our clients are thinking about and we need feedback. We are SEO experts, but we are of course not that professional in our customers’ business. For example, once we have a customer selling metalwares on his website, we use the word cheap to describe the products, however, we were told by him that this is not a good word because when people are talking about cheap, they are likely to talk about both the price and the quality, then we switch the word to inexpensive and it performs well.
BPOVIA SEO Department has customers from the whole globe and we are supposed to be very responsible for all the projects, especially regarding a campaign which needs high-discipline.
Preliminary Work before Launching an AdWords Campaign
This is not a step-by-step guide which aims at telling you how to launch a Google AdWords campaign from scratch, according to our clients, most of them have a comparatively good knowledge how Google AdWords works, they have even installed AdWords to help manage and evaluate their PPC plans, however, many of them fail to reach the expected goals and start to doubt if Google AdWords could help boost their business. The answer is YES. Sometimes they could hit the top after some tiny modifications of slogan, URL, title, etc. BPOVIA Marketing Department proves very professional in Google AdWords and has been successfully switching some PPC plans from abject to outstanding.
What is a good Google AdWords campaign? It depends what you wish you could get from it. Admittedly, revenue is usually the key elements to judge whether a plan is successful or not, sometimes, advertisers may want to lead a potential user to fill in a form or register as a member, in this way, one should be clear about what is AdWords supposed to bring. Google AdWords is only a part of the whole internet marketing chain and is the outcome of following users’ habit of surfing the internet. Google is an extraordinarily powerful mess and their advanced technology makes it easy for users to launch their PPC campaign and evaluate how it works. Good news is that Google gives every advertiser sufficient and space to create their own campaigns, at the same time, they leave challenges to all advertisers, resulted from different AdWords campaigns, some advertisers enjoy the jumped revenue and the others are suffering the mediocre outcome, or even fall in consistent red.
They should be many preliminary work to be done before activating your Google AdWords campaign. Ask yourself the questions as follows:
- Do I have an attractive landing page to every ad link?
- Do I know exactly how my competitors are doing with Google Adwords?
- Can I provide services/products as I claim?
- Can I make sure I will not be cheating my customers who click on the links?
- …
It is of great necessity to make sure you have a fantastic landing page, sometimes, you can create very charming ad slogans and people are very willing to click in to have a look, what if they land onto a pool web page? They will switch from potential customers to bouncers, it is said that people will not come to your website again if they are not impressive at first sight, you lose your customers once, you lose them for ever. A pool landing page can only decrease your reputation and waste your money.
Also, before launching your own campaign, you need to do great research on what your competitors are doing with Google AdWords. Pick giants in your field and see their ads, there must be reasons why they choose to perform an ad like this instead of that. Learn from them but not copy them.
Does every ad link lead people to the very page as it reads? If not, people may feel cheated by you and in this way you will suffer the loss of authority. If you say in the ad that you will link the user to a cat page, don’t lead them to the animal page which will take time to navigate to the very cat one. If you are not afraid of being punished by Google, you can lead the people to a car page when you say you are offering cats in your ads.
This turns to be the first episode associated with Google AdWords from BPOVIA Marketing Department, later we would like to share practical tactics with the world here and hopefully we can help your business prosper in the future days.
What Do You Think is the Most Important in On-page Optimization?
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on June 9, 2010
On-page optimization seems to be the first step of SEO, good on-page optimization equals clear and informative paths for search engine spiders to crawl, and the spiders are likely to return if they feel good about your website. Below is a list of popular on-page optimization aspects at present, just tick ONE that you think is the most important. If you don’t find any on the list, please fill the black following Other option.
Caffeine Goes Alive
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on June 9, 2010
Yesterday Google officially announced the completion of her new web indexing system called Caffeine. This time internet users are likely to enter a new searching era, because according to Google, Caffeine
- provides results which are 50 percent fresher than the last index;
- is the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered.
which means that people can fetch more relevant content within quite a short time than ever before.
The reason that Google launches this new search indexing system is because of the blossoming web content and the increasing users’ expectations. Just like Matt Cutts said, when people do a Google search, they aren’t actually searching the web, they are searching Google’s index of the web. Sometimes people believe there must be something online that they are looking for (actually usually it is true), but they cannot get them via search engines, then they become disappointed and may even switch to another search engine. To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, Caffeine is born. Google used to refresh the main layer every couple of weeks, but it is said from now on, Google would like to analyze the web in small portions and update the search index on a continuous basis.
Then what about Search Engine Optimization? For old websites, the time whose owners can sleep on the site age ends and they need to update the content again as frequently as possible, or they will get flooded with the waves from new sites; and for new websites, they are likely to suffer less from the youth, however the competition will be much more fierce due to Google’s great digestion, the only way to rank high is provide high-quality content as usual, and update frequently. Google’s new version issued on May 12 highlighted the signal that the real-time search had come, and now the signal is enhanced, video, images, news real-time updates will are displaying in the search results, SEO is absolutely an ongoing project from now on.
Google Ranking Algorithm Updates
Posted by Dolphin in Organic SEO on May 28, 2010
It is said that there are more than 200 signals Google uses to determine the position where a web site or page should be, this number keeps growing because Google dislikes that the algorithm is manipulated by someone, recently Google has been obsessed with speed, you may tell this from Chrome’s dramatic update frequency and its swift performance in visiting the website, then from Apr. 9 2010, Google includes a new signal in their search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests as they said, as is posted in Google Official Blog.
Another great change is Google Updates, which is included in Google new version of search engine issued on May 6th. Every 15 minutes Googlebot would crawl social media and display relevant results in the list. For instance, if you own an online watch shop and want to check how many people and how they are talking about you, you may perform a search query with the keyword of the brand and see the list. Google now focuses on Twttier and Facebook, but undoubtedly it will be associated with more social media.
It seems that social media is an influential element in Google ranking algorithm, but how does it work? No one can know exactly know how it works, but according to the classic PageRank and TrustRank theory, I don’t think the new algorithm would have nothing to do with the following elements:
- The quantity of social media mentions involving links to a certain web site or page;
- The quality of the social media accounts that have these mentions.
It will not be a problem for Google to count how many mentions there are, as for the quality of the social media, I think there could be many evaluation criteria. Taking Twitter as the example, Google may give more weight to those verified accounts or accounts with more followers. This is not a problem though Twitter had shared the database with Google earlier this year.
Still, no one would know exactly how Google deals with all signals, but at least we should keep an eye on their algorithm updates, there will not be ever-lasting strategies, regarding these 2 algorithm updates, I think BPOVIA so far has performed well since we always choose the most optimized codes which helps speed up the loading process and has included social media optimization in our online marketing service.