adCenter has some very powerful dynamic insertion commands for automatically passing data to an advertiser about a search click.

I wrote about their initial options a while ago when their dynamic functionality became stronger than Google’s dynamic link insertion.

adCenter recently updated their blog to go into some depth about passing these query strings. If you’re using dynamic link building, the entry is worth a read.

Joe Whyte wrote a nice article on Optimizing your 404 error page, with these tips.

1. Put a link to your FAQ page
2. Put a link to your top level categories
3. Put a link to your sitemap
4. Create a templated 404 page that blends with your site
5. Add a search box
6. Make your 404 pages look as close to your site theme as possible
7. Add a true navigation to your site.

However, as usual, I think there are certain things you can also include:

1. Ensure your error page still returns a 404 to a crawler.
   • Some blogs and CMS systems return 200 codes (found) which confuse the crawlers as to legitimate content on your site.
2. Look at the URL (or referring keyword) and then serve up search results based upon that information.
3. Serve related articles to the search term.
4. Remember your website goals!
   • You may wish to slant your 404 page towards retail, newsletter signups, subscriptions, etc.

I agree with Joe’s statement “One of the most overlooked SEO techniques is optimizing you 404 error pages”.

Joe’s article at Search Marketing Standard.
Joe’s blog at joe-whyte.

When one does a search on mobile.google.com and then clicks on a result, Google is changing the site owner’s website.  When the site has a mobile compliant pages, Google is still displaying their version to the searcher - not the website owner’s mobile version.

Google’s rendering is much worse than my site’s mobile view. In these instances, Google needs to let me (or any mobile site owner) opt out of having their content displayed in a way that was unapproved by the site owner.

Here’s a look at Google’s rendering of this website’s home page:

Here’s the version a user would see if Google didn’t change it:

Which looks better for a user?

I’d have to vote for my view.

I’m using a low tech wordpress plug-in (with some modifications) that does a browser detect (which includes phone types) to determine to serve the HTML or Mobile page. Hence, I don’t make users remember a mobile versus a PC URL (and they shouldn’t have to).

Serving mobile pages should be the same as doing a browser detect for flash (and speed) and then serving a flash or HTML version of a page.

Google is crawling the web looking for mobile pages. While that may be step one in building a mobile search product, step two is understanding what sites have mobile pages and letting users see the best page.

Mobile growth will be dependent on:

• data quality
• search experience
• website adoption

In this instance, all three exist. Google needs to let site owners have control of their content so that users can have good mobile experiences.

View your site through mobile eyes:

To see what your site looks like to Google searchers, visit Google’s mobile proxy.

To see what your site looks like on a smart phone you can download Windows 2003 Pocket PC Emulator or Windows 2003 SE Smartphone Emulator.

The AdWords Change History Tool lets one view what changes were made to an account. It even shows you which login made the change.

For those of you who are unaware, you can have multiple logins to the same AdWords account. Having multiple logins (including giving the API access one that no one else uses at all) is very useful from a tracking standpoint.

The Change History Tool lets you see changes in your account that can  be segmented by:

• Date
• Campaign
• Change type

This is very useful in both troubleshooting accounts and to see who is making (or not making) changes to your account.

Hopefully, Google will take this one step further and actually give permissions by logins similar to Yahoo’s Panama system.

At present, if someone has access to your account, they can do anything. If multiple people have access to your account, it’s important to run this tool on occasion just to see what has been happening to your account.

If you want someone to make account changes, but you don’t want them to have full access to your account, consider using the AdWords editor. The editor has the ability to export an account to someone else using the software. They can then make changes and send it back to you for review before the changes are made live. This is an excellent way to ensure that only the changes you wish are happening to your account.

The AdWords blog wrote about the change history tool for troubleshooting this week.

I recently made some small changes to the layout of this blog. I changed the top navigation to an easy to spot search bar and then added a bread crumb train just below it.

The results:

• Increase of .75 page views per visitor
• Average users searching went from around 1 in 1000 to 1 in 200
• Increased understanding of what visitors are looking for

However, this is just a fun blog. Serious marketers should be looking at even more information:

• Are the site search keywords in your PPC campaign?
  • Measure the conversions and then consider adding them.
• Are the site search keywords in your SEO campaign?
  • Look at their competitive nature and consider adding them if they are adding conversions to your website.
• How many ‘0 returned search results’ are your visitors seeing?
  • Do you need to build content around those terms?
• Are your PPC visitors searching immediately upon visiting the site?
  • Maybe they need to be sent to another page

One of my favorite places to start expanding keywords (PPC and SEO) is by examining site search keywords. People who search on your site are not just leaving when they don’t find the answer - they are continuing to interact with your brand by searching.

Are you collecting and analyzing site search keywords?

If not, you need to start collecting, analyzing, and acting upon this valuable data.

Patricia has a nice write up at Search Engine Land on reducing the barriers to registration. She mostly focuses on forms, so I’d like to offer a little bit of follow up advice.

How intimidating do your forms look?

If you think of collecting:

• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Email

How many form fields does that require?

You could collect:

1. First name
2. Middle initial
3. Last name
4. Address line 1
5. Address line 2
6. Apartment/suite number
7. City
8. State
9. Zip 5
10. Zip + 4
11. Area code
12. First 3 phone digits
13. Last 4 phone digits
14. Email
15. Email verification

That 4 pieces of data became 15 fields. That’s a significant amount of fields for not even collecting credit cards.

How short could this form be?

1. Name (first and last)
2. Address line 1
3. Address line 2 (optional)
4. Zip code (if you know the zip, you know the city and state)
5. Phone number
6. Email address

A total of 6 fields.

The argument will come into play that development wants two fields for the name so it fits nicely into the database. Or, they might need the phone number in xxx-xxx-xxxx format (or (xxx) xxx-xxx or xxxxxxxxxx, or (xxx) xxxxxx, etc) therefore they want 3 fields.

If someone is giving you personal information, your system should do the heavy lifting. You should parse out the names. You should be able to strip out extra characters from the phone number to make it fit into your database (the same can be said for credit cards. If someone is willing to give you their credit card - TAKE IT. You should be able to parse out the info on the back end for merchant processing).

Forms can look intimidating. Lessen the impact on how the form looks by lessening the fields and do work on the backend. If someone is willing to give you information, then process it. Don’t error out the page and make them resubmit the information so that it’s easy for you to put into the database. Parse, cleanse, do whatever is necessary with the data so that it’s easy for the consumer.

Forms are one of the least optimized pages on the web.

The most expensive business proposition is often forming new customer relationships. Ensure that your pags are friendly, look friendly, act friendly, and have a high convesion rate.

The Google Plus box has received a lot of attention lately in local queries. The new expanded results for financial data will be rolling out soon for financial queries.

Right now, if one searches for a stock symbol, it’s pretty straightforward that one is looking for financial data, so Google shows the information directly in the search result.

However, for ambiguous queries where one might be looking for financial data, or might be looking for something different, Google is adding the Plus Box to the results.

Here’s a screenshot of the plus box for ‘General Electric’:

Google has done a nice job of allowing for more information to be found in a search result without cluttering the initial results.

My question is: Is adding all of this additional information directly into the search results lowering the amount of traffic Google sends to websites?

When Google launched, their goal was for someone to spend as few seconds as possible on their search results. If they delivered the perfect search result, then one could go from a result to a webpage in moments.

Now, with additional information being added to the search page itself, does this keep more users just on the search page, and not going to additional places for information in some instances?

The 3rd version of the Adwords editor was just released for the MAC.

Details on V3.

Download page for MAC V3.

At the turn of the century, SEO was based upon on-page factors. Over time, these factors changed from on-page to off-page, and SEO was as much about relationship (link) building as it was about on page factors.

During this time, PPC evolved to be all about dollars and ad relevancy (CTR). However, times have changed. SEOs spend their time thinking about marketing, and PPC analysts spend their time thinking about on-page factors due to the ambiguous quality score.

If we examine SEO from the late 90s and early 2000s, the major engines were AltaVista, Hotbot, Excite, and Lycos. Each of these engines had different algorithms for determining relevancy. However, the one item they all had in common was that relevancy was determined by on-page factors.

This created an atmosphere where SEO was about reverse engineering each engine individually and then creating specific pages (often called doorway pages) for each engine. One looked at ranking by engine, and then didn’t tweak the site, a SEO tweaked an individual page that was created for that crawler.

During this time, GoTo.com (which evolved into Overture.com and now Yahoo Search Marketing) was pay per position marketing. The highest bidder was number one, end of story. Then Google introduced AdWords Select and shook up the marketplace with ‘relevancy’.

An ad’s rank was based around the max CPC (cost per click) and the ads CTR (click through rate). This formula quickly let Google put ‘relevancy’ into the hands of its users by ‘electing’, virtue of the highest click through rate, the most relevant ads for any term. At the same time, this score helped Google maximize revenues by showing the ads which were most likely to contribute to Google’s profits.

While Google was determining relevancy by CTR, Overture was still looking at max bids for placement, PPC was about ad copy and conversion rates. Those were the two important metrics to measure. One could still measure conversion rate by ad copy, keywords, position, etc. However, the landing pages were about conversions for PPC, and they were about organic rankings for the SEOs.

As Google gained in popularity, SEO changed. The introduction of Pagerank (and then trustrank) meant that off-page factors could make as much of an impact (and often more) than on-page factors. The effectiveness of doorway pages feel into oblivion. SEO became part of marketing in the form of link building (or relationship building when sites agreed to link to each other for the mutual benefit of both).

Link building has evolved over time as the algorithms became smarter at finding reciprocal, three way, farms, and spam links. However, SEO was forever changed from just examining a page and algo shift, making some tweaks, and seeing the results. Now, one had to talk in ‘theory’ about links and marketing.

Recently, PPC has introduced the notion of ‘quality score’. Quality score is the next evolution of ‘highest CTR’ or ‘highest bid’ means that your ad will be placed tops in the ad listings. Essentially, Google thinks of searchers as its users. They don’t want to just send someone to a page if that marketer is paying the most money. They want to send users to pages where a searcher will have a good experience. Hence, ads positions are now determined by quality score and maximum bid.

Instead of a pay-per-position or ‘just have a relevant ad’ (i.e. high click through rate), PPC marketers have to look at landing page factors, click through rate history, ad copy, etc and begin to reverse engineer algorithms.

Gone are the days when pay per click just meant conversion rates, click through rate, and marketing dollars. They are the new SEOs. However, their SEO is remarkably similar to turn of the century SEO.

With Google, Yahoo, and adCenter all having different quality score algorithms, there are three formulas to reverse engineer. Since off-page factors aren’t used in these determinations, the factors are limited to strictly on-page or on-site. Sound similar to turn of the century SEO?

The days of the doorway pages isn’t dead; it’s been transformed from SEO to PPC.

Find the SEOs who specialized in formula engineering and page creation and offer them a job as a ‘quality score engineer’.

It’s time to dust off your old doorway page generator and start programming it for PPC.

Turn of the century SEO isn’t dead. It’s now known as PPC landing page quality score.

New Content Partners

Google is always working to add new quality content partners to their network. They just announced the addition of three new content partners that are available for Site Targeting.

• WSJ.com
• MarketWatch.com
• extratv.warnerbros.com

MySpace.com Inventory

MySpace.com has an estimated 130 million unique visitors a month, and over one billion page-views per month. With 100% of text-based ads on MySpace search pages and approximately 20% of ads on MySpace content pages being served by Google, MySpace premium inventory is available to all AdWords advertisers.

New demo vidoes for AdWords are now available. They are segmented into five categories:

1. Auto
2. Business Services
3. Entertainment
4. Retail
5. Small Businesses

https://adwords.google.com/select/afc/ads/videoadsdemo.html

Google Professional Services Program Nearing Two Years of Age

If you were one of the first GAPs, then it’s time to take the test again. In your account login, you’ll see a message telling you of the expiration date 90 in advance of the certification expiring.

Pausing Keywords & Ads

One has the ability to pause keywords, ads, or sites.

AdWords Editor V3 Released

The latest version of the editor was released which has several new features.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets has tour and supports 12 new languages

French, Italian, German, Spanish, English (UK), Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, Russian, Turkish, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese have been added as supported languages for Docs & Spreadsheets.

There is also a nice tour available.

Quality Score is now Viewable

Google has launched customized columns. One of the new columns is quality score. Here’s a walkthrough of how to view your quality score.

In addition, there was a quality score change which will help established advertisers add new words for which there isn’t a search history and still receive acceptible minimum bids to try out these keywords.

Google launches Retail Training Center

There is a nice trainingcenter for retail businesses. Full list of training centers available here.