Following up on last week’s interview post with Microsoft’s Ken Headrick I thought it would be useful to share some additional insights that came from follow up questions I had with him.

How important is a #1 ranking?

The first insight relates to “golden triangle” that Ken talked about when discussing how important it is to be #1 in the search engine’s index. Ken referred to data from Enquiro, a Canadian company (I actually interviewed Enquiro founder George Hotchkiss recently and he shared some very useful insights).

Here is a picture of what Ken was referring to taken from Enquiro’s website:

This represents output from Enquiro’s eye tracking software which records where your eyes go when you are on a page. As you can see with the three main search engines, if you’re not at the top of the page, you pretty much will get ignored. The red color indicates a significant amount of time spent looking at a particular section on the screen. From these results, Google users in particular only seem to pay attention to the #1 result while Microsoft searchers look over a few of the top results before making up their mind where to click.

Is Microsoft A Better Place For Advertisers?

Another one of Ken’s interview answers included the following statement:

Microsoft adCenter (the system you use to book PPC ads on Microsoft Live Search) provides the highest conversions in many categories.

I found this interesting and later asked him to provide a few more specifics where possible. His Marketing Manager, Melanie, quickly got back to me with the following information:

Microsoft Live Search has the highest conversion rates—on average, 71% higher than Yahoo! and twice that of Google.**Conversion is defined as a web visitor entering into a secure session on a website. ComScore Study September–November 2007.

Specific Categories that Live Search has had a higher conversion rate higher than Google and Yahoo!
- Travel
- Auto
- Retail

Once again, if you’re interested in meeting Ken and learning more about him and Microsoft’s search engine, he is one of speakers at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ken Headrick, the Director of Products and Marketing for MSN Canada about how website owners can succeed with search. Ken is one of speakers at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference. (sidenote: I will be going to the conference from June 16-18 and will be reporting back on what I learn).

Here are the questions I asked Ken and his responses (my favourites are the last 3):

What has happened in Search in the last year and what can we expect over the next year?

A little more than 1 year ago Yahoo and Microsoft brought our PPC offerings to Canada and provided advertisers with new and different options. Generally, more Canada businesses are investing in Search but we are still quite a bit slower to adopt this technology as compared to businesses in the US or the UK. Market shares have grown for Google while the Microsoft market share has held steady and Yahoo’s has declined to the point that Microsoft is solidly in the #2 position in Canada in terms of search market share. The search experience is evolving in that there is more and more search pages displaying more than just the 10 links. Results show videos, images, maps and other relevant information on most of the major engines. More and more information is being put into the search engines to the point that I am not sure that people know that they can query stock prices or weather forecasts or sports scores or do local searches for businesses in their neighbourhood on Microsoft Live Search and some of the other engines. There is lots of innovation but a final one is that there are new mobile search offerings coming to market to allow you to search from your cell phone or Windows Mobile phone.

Local Search. How does it work and which businesses does it make sense for?

Local search is very popular as 46% of searches have some sort of location involved in the search. Local search is particularly popular on mobile phones for finding businesses in a local area like a restaurant, or a store etc. and this importance will only increase over time. Most of the major engines populate their local searches with databases from common popular local providers. It is important if your business involves a physical location you want to drive people to, that as consumer behaviour changes toward using the internet to search for things, that your business can be found in the local search of all of the major engines.

When I search for my business, I rank pretty low. What can I do to get ranked higher?

Most of the major search engines have a link on their pages for webmasters. Follow those links to the search engines tools, forums for discussion on tips and tracks and to participate in the SEO community (Search Engine Optimization) and pose your questions there and get help from others on how to improve your site. There are also a variety of free tools that webmasters can you to assess how they are ranking and for assessing the pages of their sites. Minimizing flash and other elements that are difficult to for a crawler to index, submitting your site maps to the engines directly, keeping your site content fresh and using your keywords in the titles and body of your pages, are a few of the basic guidelines.

Organic or PPC? How should a website owner determine where to spend her time and money?

It always make sense to make sure that your site is well search engine optimized so that that each of the engine’s crawlers can find you and the webmaster tools available from each search engine and a variety of partners can help with is activity. Depending on what you do and how broad your offerings are, it may be very difficult to come up on the first page on 100 different terms or on the specific terms you are interested in if they are common words or they are very competitive. In which case, PPC guarantees that you will be shown to your prospective customers in all of the cases that you want to. Thus, it is generally a good practice to be balanced in your approach recognizing that this will be different for each advertiser’s unique situation.

Microsoft or Google? Why should webmasters look at what Microsoft and not just focus on Google?

Generally it is best to advertise with all of the major engines to do Search as searchers for several reasons. Firstly, search advertising is likely the most measurable, trackable, controllable and provides the best ROI as compared to any other form of advertising you can do. Based on that, advertisers should be investing as much as they can, in as many engines as they can, to drive the most effective use of their marketing budgets. Second, Microsoft adCenter (the system you use to book PPC ads on Microsoft Live Search) provides the highest conversions in many categories as compared to Google and Yahoo and the cost per click will be cheaper with Microsoft adCenter and thus your returns will be better. Thirdly, Microsoft Live Search also reaches 46% of all online Canadians searching – over 10 Million people and we have the #2 market share in Canada – 2% share points ahead of Yahoo. This comes partly from the fact that MSN is the #1 portal in Canada and has the #1 position with over 90% share with Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger and so we have a very large audience to help you target. Finally, using Microsoft adCenter allows you to do demographic targeting of your ads to help boost your conversions and the ROI of your campaigns.

How valuable is a the #1 spot or page 1 spot worth?

This can get technical but there is a fairly well known piece of research by a Canadian company called Enquiro that uses eye-tracking technology to track searchers behaviour on search results pages where you have a typical 10 links being shown. The study shows where people look and refers to “the golden triangle” that lies on its side across the top of the page and points out to the right. While it is generally true that click through rates decline from the #1 position through the other positions at the top of the page and continues to decline down the right hand side, most advertisers will test and experiment with their campaigns and can move their positions up and down the listing of ads in the mainline (top of the page) and along the right side of the page to assess the changes in price per click vs. click through rate declines and reach the optimal return. The key point here is to test and that results will be different on different engines and for different advertisers.

What do you think of Ken’s comments?

PubMatic recently released its second monthly PubMatic AdPrice Index (view the website). The index indicates that the economic slowdown in the U.S. is beginning to impact the online advertising industry, with overall monetization dropping by 23 percent. The PubMatic AdPrice Index is based on data from over 3,000 publishers and billions of ad impressions.

The PubMatic AdPrice Index revealed surprising weakness in monetization for the vast majority of Web sites. Large Web sites fared the worst while small Web sites managed to maintain their monetization rates. eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.18 in March to $1.29 in April.

Here are some of the findings:

• On average, Web site monetization dropped by 23 percent from 49 cents in March to 38 cents in April. *Pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.
• Among the verticals, Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent from 40 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Gaming and Sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat at 83 cents in April vs. 82 cents in March, but is still off January highs of 92 cents.
• In April 2008, 77 percent of small Web sites garnered net publisher eCPMs from ad networks of under $1.00, compared with 95 percent of medium Web sites and 100 percent of large web sites.

To combat the drop in monetization, many publishers are adopting best practices to maintain or grow their Web site revenues. These best practices include:

• Network diversification: Working with multiple ad networks (as opposed to one or two) to find the right mix of optimum advertising campaigns.
• Monetizing international traffic: Working with foreign-based ad networks to better monetize international site visitors. While international traffic is often a minority of a publisher’s traffic volume, this traffic can be highly lucrative because of the weak U.S. dollar and the growth environment outside of the US.
• Segmentation strategy: Segmenting a Web site into various categories (finance, travel, lifestyle) and using different ad tags for each category. Most ad networks are better able to target relevant campaigns to a Web site’s inventory as a result.

Two weeks ago I offered free SEO advice to TheLocoMono. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Raza from Boycott Software Sweatshops.

Boycott Software Sweatshops - http://www.softwaresweatshop.com/

Hey Evan,

My blog needs some serious SEO help. I get good traffic by commenting on other blogs, but I don’t have much experience optimizing my site to get good search engine traffic. I get a decent response from my site, it’s helped me close a ton of business so I’d love your critiques and suggestions.

Thanks,

Raza Imam
http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com

My Recommendations

1) Post More Often

A quick glance at your blog shows that you’ve only posted two entries in your blog over the past month. Google loves fresh content that is regularly updated. I would suggest to post at least once a week and continue in a regular pattern. In November and December you posted eight posts per month while in May you’ve only done one and we’re half way through the month.

2) Write 300 Words or More

Google wants to see that your posts have enough meat to them before they rank you in their index. You want to make sure that your posts are at least 300 words to show Google that it is a serious post and is worthy of their attention. Your most recent post is only 209 words while the one before it is only 176 words. Try to make a serious effort for future posts to get over the 300 word threshold.

3) Get More Links

This seems to be a recurring theme with many of the sites that have been submitted. Your Page Rank is only a 2 and you need to get a higher ranking if you want your pages to come up in Google’s index. Instead of spending your time commenting on other people’s blogs (blog comments are usually set to “nofollow” which means you get no Page Rank benefit from them), I would try to establish link relationships with those blogs, write in forums which do not have the “nofollow” on them, post articles in article directories, and write great content that people want to link to.

Good luck Raza!

Readers, what do you think about Boycott Software Sweatshops’s website?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

I woke up a couple of days ago and checked my AdSense stats as a part of my regular morning routine. I was shocked to find out that my earnings for the day so far were less than 10% of what they usually should be.

Was my site down? No.

Were my AdSense ads showing? Yes.

Did AdSense send me an email about my account? No.

Was it just my site? Why were the bloggers I follow not talking about this?

What happened?

As it turned out, it was just a reporting issue on Google’s side. AdSense was still tracking clicks and making me money but was having problems displaying the data in the reports. Whew. It took a while to figure it out and I was relieved when I got the official word through Google’s AdSense blog.

The research I was doing, however, did send me to an interesting new feature that Google has just launched called AdSense Known Issues. According to Google the page gives readers a “list of currently known AdSense issues and possible work-arounds. Please know that we are working as quickly as possible to resolve these issues and appreciate your patience.”

I was pleased to see that my particular issue was known and being worked on:

Reports not being updated with current data. Last Updated May 6, 2008

Issue: Reports are taking longer than usual to generate, and aren’t showing complete data for earnings, clicks, and impressions.Work-Around: None at the moment, but rest assured that this delay in reports won’t affect your earnings or payments.

Updates: Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.

Two weeks ago I offered free SEO advice to Supper Thyme USA. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Mark from TheLocoMono.

TheLocoMono - http://thelocomonowebsite.com

I would like to take you up on your offer for SEO advice. I have been reading your blog for some time now so I am curious to hear what you have to say. My website, TheLocoMono Website started out as a popotouri of topics and last month I simplified these topics into sub-domains so along with a remodeled design using a paid WP theme, it is starting to look a lot better, traffic is somewhat the same as it was before but more spread out across the sub-domains and main site.

I am curious to see what I can do to increase traffic to my sub-domain and/or somehow tie them into my main website. A challenge but neverless shoot for Pluto as I like to say.

–
Muchas Gracias,

Mark

My Recommendations

1) Pick Better Keywords
I like your category idea but you should pick keywords that you have a change of ranking for. As an example, look at your Just Business section. Are people really searching for “Just Business”? Use keywords that are related to the topics you are writing about but will also drive targeted traffic for you because you can get on page 1 in Google for them.

2) Use Your Pictures For SEO

Your images can not only help you rank for select keywords, they can also drive some serious traffic to your site through the Google image search. Your logo is called TLMlogo.gif and your alt tag is “Logo”. Change your pictures around so that the file name and, at the very least, alt tags are helping you with your SEO efforts.

3) Increase Your Keyword Density

If you don’t use your keywords on your page in multiple locations it will be hard to get Google to pay attention. Look at your Just Personal Finance Page. You have the key phrase Personal Finance in your title tag, in your url, and your H1 tag. Then you don’t use Personal Finance anywhere else on the page. You need to make sure that your posts mention the keywords you are trying to rank for. If your posts aren’t related to personal finance then consider changing the topic name to something that you are likely to write about in your posts (and a key phrase that is not as competitive as Personal Finance).

Good luck Mark!

Readers, what do you think about TheLocoMono’s website?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

If you run advertising on your website then you should get excited about Google Ad Manager. It’s a new service that Google has created to help web publishers manage their ad inventory and optimize it so that you make the most money for the space available. If you’re making $5 eCPM when you could be making $50 eCPM, what impact would that have on your business?

It’s exclusive at the moment and difficult to get in, however. I applied twice and never got a response. So I started pulling connections. I contacted everyone I knew at Google and one of my contacts got me on the beta this afternoon. My site serves over 1 million ad impressions every month so keeping up with it all can be very difficult. I tried installing openX but then found out that my version of MYSQL was too high for openX to handle (come on openX - get your act together). I end up running everything from an Excel spreadsheet which became very time consuming and prone to error if I didn’t triple check everything.

Enter Google Ad Manager. You can create campaigns for each section of your site, it gives you detailed reports on how each ad is performing, and you can optimize them so if private ads are pulling better than AdSense (or vice-versa) it will show the ads that bring you the most money.

When you first get access, it’s a lot to take in. There are so many features but they do a good job of giving video tutorials on how to use all the tools. I’m not much of a read the manual kind of guy and prefer to figure it out on my own but the videos are very well done and worth watching.

The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to create monthly campaigns. Most of my advertisers buy an exclusive ad spot for a month at a time. They essentially sponsor an entire section at a time. I bill them monthly and show the ad. Google Ad Manager allows you to sell ads by a CPM or CPC model. They also allow a CPD model (Cost per Day) but I’ve yet to figure out how to make it recurring.

I’m excited to be on the program and test it out. I only had an hour to review it before leaving the office so there’s still a lot to discover. Every entrepreneur should always be on the lookout for ways to create systems and make processes more efficient. I’m betting that Google Ad Manager will be a must have for any website owner if they plan on making money by selling advertising.

I’ll keep you posted as I learn more about the tool. Does anyone have any of their own experiences with Google Ad Manager?

Last week I offered free SEO advice for the Stratford Heights Church of God. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Keri from Supper Thyme USA.

Supper Thyme USA - http://www.supperthymeusa.com

Help Me!!!! Please!!!!!!!!

www.supperthymeusa.com

Thank you!
Keri

My Recommendations

1) Add More Text

You want to have at least 300 words of text per page if you want Google  to pick it up. Your homepage, for example, only has 150 words on it. The rest of the homepage is a combination of Javascript and Flash. While those technologies help the website look visually appearling, Google can’t read them so you need to have enough text on there to get ranked. Your inside pages should also have at least 300 words or more on them. For example, the extreme fitness meals page should have a more descriptive overview so you can rank for related keywords.

2) Improve Your Title Tags

Perhaps the most important individual thing you can do on your website to improve your chances of ranking in Google is to put your keywords in your title tag. The title tag is the area at the very top of the page, above the url field. Your visitors probably don’t notice it but Google sure does. You made the classic mistake that many website owners make in having every page title be the same. In this case your page title is “Supper Thyme USA” for all of your pages. Each page should have its own title tag and should include descriptive keywords that you are trying to rank for. The extreme fitness meals page should at the very least have Extreme Fitness Meals in the title. Use 100 characters at the most for your title.

3) Get more content

Schedule some time aside every month to write new articles and put them on your site. Make the articles relevant to your site and have them cover interesting topics. For example you could discuss the importance of a home cooked meal, how to deal with a stressful lifestyle, how to pick healthy meal options, etc. Make each article 300 words or more as well. Having the articles on your site will make you more appealing to Google, will help you rank for related keywords, and they might also get picked up by bloggers and mainstream media.

Good luck Keri! I hope the advice helps!

Readers, what do you think about Supper Thyme USA’s website?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

Last week I offered free SEO advice for Publiside. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Brian from the Stratford Heights Church of God.

Stratford Heights Church of God - http://www.shcog.com

SEO Advice - I have designed a site for my church www.shcog.com and I would love some SEO advice on it. It was created using PHP, CSS and JavaScript

Brian

My Recommendations

1) Get some links!
Right now you have a Page Rank of 1. This means that Google has recognized your website and has given it the lowest score you can receive (unless you have been penalized in which case you get a 0). If you don’t have some kind of authority in Google’s eyes then you won’t get traffic. Get Page Rank by building your links. How about asking your parishioners to link to your website or getting your Oasis Youth group on a link building campaign as a start?

2) Create more content

You want to have pages with at least 300 words of content if you want to get ranked in Google. Most of your pages do not fit this criteria. You should also consider adding new content that you can drive traffic to. A good place to start would be converting some of your sermon audios into text files. Google doesn’t pick up audio but there is a lot of information here that if you turned into articles would help drive traffic to your website.

3) Optimize around important keywords

Right now you rank on the first page for Stratford Heights Church but unless someone is specifically searching you out, they won’t find your website. You should consider which keywords will help drive more traffic. Perhaps optimizing for Middletown Church (Middletown is the city where the church is located) would get more people finding you. Once you’ve picked your keywords, put them in your title tags and make sure to use them throughout your pages.

Good luck Brian! I hope the advice helps!

Readers, what do you think about the Stratford Heights Church of God website?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

Last week I offered free SEO advice for Radical Notion. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Gail from Publiside.

Publiside - http://www.publiside.com

Hi Evan –

My site is www.publiside.com; would love to know how you think it may be better SEO’d.

Thanks,
gail

My Recommendations

1) Change your title tag

Right now your home page title tag is PUBLISIDE “Get yourself known.” You are going to rank for Publiside because it’s your domain name so take it out of your title tag. Get yourself known is also barely searched in Google’s index according to their keyword selection tool. You might rank on the first page for the term but if nobody is searching for it, who cares? “Personal public relations” and “Personal publicity” are more popular alternatives but are also more competitive. “Personal publicist”, on the other hand, is more popular than “Get yourself known” and is not very competitive to rank for. It’s a win-win because you can rank for the keyword and it will drive some traffic for you. If you are looking for more Milwaukee area clients you can add the more competitive keywords with Milwaukee in front of it to drive targeted traffic.

2) Dump the frames

Most of your content on the home page has been put in frames. The text is not being picked up by Google with the frames you are using so all the hard work that went into generating content is going to waste. Move the text into html code such as tables. You can get a similar effect and Google can recognize the text. Try to have at least 300 words of Google-recognized content on each page.

3) Get more articles

You have a section called SIDEbar (articles) which is a fantastic idea but there is only one article listed. Again, Google ranks websites first based on content so you need to have substantial content to drive traffic. Why not put up each press release that you write for your clients? How about sharing some of the articles that they have appeared in? In what other ways can you build out your articles section?

4) Non SEO Advice - Logo, contact info

People generally expect to be able to get back to the homepage of a website from inside pages. This is usually done by clicking somewhere on the top like the logo that you have prominently displayed. It’s simple enough to make that picture into a link and it will improve your site usability. Also, if your goal is to have people contact you, you need to have your contact information on every page. Right now you only show “Leader in Sports, Fitness and Author / Publishing Publicity Nationwide” at the bottom of each page. There is also no visible link on the inside pages on how to contact you such as in the sidebar. Why not include a phone number on each page or an email address where people can reach you?

Good luck Gail! I hope the advice helps!

Readers, what do you think about Publiside?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!