Have you ever wondered how Google determines where to rank your pay-per-click (PPC) ads in the sponsored search results? Google has come up with what they call an Ad Quality Score that will help explain how they go about ranking ads. Google defines Ad Quality Score a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.Components to Ad Quality ScoreClick...

For people who are not familiar with vFlyer, they are a classified ad creation, management, and submission platform, allowing sellers to quickly reach consumers in multiple marketplaces by creating attractive “virtual flyers”.I am not a real estate professional by any means; however we have helped a bunch of real estate brokers and agents with the marketing of their properties and listings online. We use to post their listings on sites like Trulia, Zillow, and Google Base individually. This took some time because we were manually adding their listings to each of these real estate...

It doesn’t matter if you are building a new website, conducting search engine optimization, PPC advertising, or a social media strategy, there are always going to be important questions that need to be answered by the client. Having detailed answers to these questions will help you formulate a much better strategy. I broke up the questions in different sections. The first four sections of questions are broad questions that you could ask any client to get a better understanding of what they do, who they are targeting and what their goals are. Then there are project specific questions, depending...

Let’s face it, the majority of us SEO’s and agencies do not work with fortune 500 companies. We mainly work with small to medium size businesses that have minimal to no in-house marketing team to work with. Many of the more popular SEO blogs give great recommendations on how to form detailed SEO strategies. However a lot of these strategies are only realistic for the larger corporations who have the money and the resources to implement such strategies. The Dilemma that SEO companies and consultants face with the smaller clients is that they simply don’t have the time to create...

WARNING: Blackhat SEO are things NOT to do to improve your website rankings. They can result in lower search rankings or get your site completely banned from search engines. It use to be that people could perform these blackhat SEO tactics on a website and increase their search rankings dramatically. Some developers knew that it was wrong to do these things and still did them anyways, and others did them without knowing what they were doing was wrong. Now days search engine robots have gotten much better at recognizing these tactics and will penalize your site for doing so. I wanted to explain...

Testing can be a never ending battle, depending on how thorough you are looking to test. The idea is to find the most effective web page that will lead to the best results. Your results may be, increased time on site, increase in page views, increase in # of signups, etc… There are two main ways you can go about testing your website. Below are the two best ways to test and what scenario you should use each. A/B TestingA/B or split testing is probably the simplest form of testing there is. You are basically developing two different versions of a web page and seeing which version produces better...

With new social communities popping up everywhere, it is hard to ignore them as a new means of communication with your target market. Social communities have broken the communication barrier between marketers and consumers. With Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us; Social Networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook; and Social Content Sharing sites like Reddit, Technorati, Newsvine it allows marketers to interact with their market like never before. Unlike traditional advertising, social media allows for people to have an engaging experience by being able to start...

Link Building is probably the biggest aspect of off-site SEO. In this post I discuss how to find links, analyze your competitors for top link partners, how to develop great content for people to link to, and how to spread the word about your content. Analyzing Links There are a number of Link Building tools you can use to find good link partners. The easiest way to see who is linking to you is to go to Yahoo! or Yahoo! Site Explorer and type link:www.yoursite.com. It will give you all of the websites that are linking to your site. If you are trying to find people who are linking to your competitors...