SMX London: 221 takeaways and top tips

Posted by Gareth Davies on 16 May, 2011
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Tips & tricks from SMX 2011

SMX London is now consistently SMX Advanced and so worthy of our and your attention. Gareth Davies, Mal Darwen and Mark Nunney attended and were ably supported by Thomas Baugh manning the Twitter watchtower.

We've got 221 takeaways in total for you ...

The future of search

1) Google receives approximately 88 billion queries per month.
Chris Sherman

2) 20% of results can now be social which is certainly a pretty hefty portion of the search real estate!
Chris Sherman

3) Facebook accounts for 16% of all online time, YouTube 9%, Google 5%.
Chris Sherman

4) Google makes 300-500 changes to its algorithm each year.
Chris Sherman

5) Google personalization affects results whether you're logged in or not.
Chris Sherman

6) Optimizing for 'Google Instant' isn't recommended. Unless you have really relevant content for partial words, your content will likely just get swallowed up.
Chris Sherman

7) Plus One (Google's voting system) could become a factor in time, but Google still prefers internal algorithms to outside signals.
Chris Sherman

8) With the direction that Google is going in, local and mobile will become more important.
Christine Churchill

SEO

9) Focus on site quality - build and optimize social media profiles.
Christine Churchill

10) Google Instant is changing searcher behavior. People are having to type a bit slower with Google Instant so they can look at the suggestions and the results.
Christine Churchill

11) Good page title tags are still your best on-page tool.
Christine Churchill

12) A good page title can increase your clickthrough rate. Spend more time on them. Make them compelling to the user.
Christine Churchill

13) Consider producing content that will help keep a user on your website (long articles, video increases time on site).
Christine Churchill

14) If you don't have a pre-established strong social network then get to work on that now.
Christine Churchill

15) Optimize for Local and Mobile: expect increased emphasis on local results and mobile use to continue to grow.
Christine Churchill

16) We think of Google's results page as our homepage - Joel Spolsky
Gil Reich

17) Bing is seeing more growth because of traffic acquisition deals rather than loyalty. Eg, appearing on Facebook, games and apps etc.
Gil Reich

18) Diversify traffic sources as much as possible.
Max Thomas

19) An active URL is a new concept - a page people go to, link to, share on Facebook: ie, there is an engagement. We now need people to engage with our pages.
Max Thomas

20) Matt Cutts mentioned that if you have a lot of URLs that people are not engaging with, then you might want to remove them from your website or noindex them.
Max Thomas

21) Engaging users can help increase comments, reach new people with guest blogging schemes and increase leads.
Max Thomas

22) Don't put all your eggs in the Google basket. Having lots of paid channels alongside organic traffic can be less risky.
Max Thomas

23) Use page titles as ad copy as well as a ranking tool.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

24) 10 years ago I said DO NOT OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINES. Simple, it remains the best SEO strategy ever.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

25) If what you're doing is not what users want then it is a short-term strategy. Optimize for users because this is what the search engines will always want to do in the future. This is the best SEO strategy I can offer you today and tomorrow!
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

26) Back in the 1990s SEO was very easy, algorithms were simple, SEO was all about on-site factors and that made it very easy to reverse engineer. Search engines had very few, if any, people dedicated to fighting spam. Many SEOs still base a lot of their principles on what happened back then and it's a completely different game in 2011. Algorithms today are extremely complex - involving onsite, offsite and social factors.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

27) Today search engines' indexes are huge and the competition is high. It makes it extremely difficult to reverse engineer. Huge teams fight spam at search engines. Black hat tricks have shorter life cycles. That's not to say it's not worth the effort in some industries.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

28) If you're trying to reverse engineer for the search engines then you are optimizing for yesterday's algorithm.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

29) Social imprint now has an effect on SEO.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

30) Make unique meta descriptions. If you can't make them unique then leave them empty rather than having duplicate ones across the site. Let Google scrape some content from the page and use that instead.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Panda

31) "Low quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site's rankings." Paraphrasing Google's Amit Singhal on Panda.
Amit Singhal

32) Post-Panda, pay attention to page layout and quality. Reduce the number of ads, have deep original content and authoritative authors.
Christine Churchill

33) A long time on a site (long click) is a satisfactory search for Google. Ie, low bounce rate. If G sees users immediately going back (short click) the page is seen as less valuable.
Christine Churchill

34) If you were hit by Panda, some things to consider include: optimizing beyond Google; looking at other engines as sources for traffic eg, YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, press releases, local listings, etc.
Christine Churchill

Link building

35) The larger your link profile, the less impact from risky links.
Max Thomas via Max Brockbank

36) Chances are a risky linking scheme will not crash your site ...
Max Thomas

37) ... unless the New York Times gets involved with Google :)
Max Thomas

38) Create community as part of your link building strategy.
Max Thomas

39) Make link building part of how you do business.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen via Omar Kattan

Paid search

40) Use various ads and formats for a remarketing display campaign. That way remarketing is less likely to frustrate people.
Guy Levine via Eddie Borgers

41) Use social sharing options, as an audience following you will be much better to communicate with over a long period.
Guy Levine via Microsoft adCenter

42) Visit www.letsearchmakeyousmarter.com to download free search intelligence tool plugging into Excel and Bing database.
Jonathan Beeston via Cedric Chambaz

43) Build a brand with an audience that is going to need you in the future.
Josh Shatkin-Margolis via Microsoft adCenter

44) Don't just retarget those that have been to your website, retarget anyone who has searched on relevant terms as this is a MUCH bigger audience.
Josh Shatkin-Margolis via Cameron Cowan

45) Three remarketing tips: 'measure incremental benefit, employ frequency capping and use a dynamic creative'.
Stuart Meyler via Microsoft adCenter

46) Dynamic creatives improve response, the most simple segmentation has a huge impact.
Stuart Meyler via Microsoft adCenter

47) Retargeting with basic audience segmentation can improve response rates by 4% to 5%
Stuart Meyler via Greg Sterling

48) Very few retargeting ads I see use the knowledge they have of me and what I have shopped.
Stuart Meyler via Microsoft adCenter

49) If advertising is useful, people don't really think of it as advertising.
Stuart Meyler via Microsoft adCenter

International SEO

50) French use English keywords for searching for cheap flights.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

51) Yandex has 58% market share in Russia. Google only 24 per cent.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

52) Submit your site to Yandex - don't rely on it finding you.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan.

53) Local links critical for ranking in Russia.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

54) Put calls to action in titles for Yandex as it takes search description text from page body.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

55) Baidu have 69% market share in China. Google only 28%.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

56) Eye-tracking study shows Baidu users look much further down the page.
Oban Multilingual via Max Brockbank

57) Multi-variant testing results not necessarily the same across markets. Localize your tests.
Oban Multilingual via Omar Kattan

Keyword research

58) Keyword research tools will save you time and keep you sane.
Christine Churchill

59) Google tool only uses keywords with commercial value.
Christine Churchill

60) Make sure you look at other factors such as competitiveness of keywords as well as seasonality for the keywords.
Christine Churchill

61) Use a variety of keyword tools to make your keyword data better
Christine Churchill

Wordtracker's keyword research tool lets you use data from metacrawler search engines and Google.

62) Keyword research tools will save you time.
Christine Churchill

63) Keyword research tools will keep you sane.
Christine Churchill

64) 95% of searches are long tail searches. If you only focus on the head of the search tail you are potentially missing out on most of the traffic.
Kevin Gibbons

65) Target the long tail by identifying themes and building matching content.
Kevin Gibbons

66) Long tail searches convert better.
Kevin Gibbons

67) Long tail searches have a lower bounce rate.
Kevin Gibbons

68) Type your target keyword followed by 'how to' into Google Instant, for keyword suggestions that can help with ideas on content creation around your target keywords.
Kevin Gibbons

69) Use Google Adwords as a test for keyword research ... try running it for a month.
Kevin Gibbons

70) Use multiple tools to verify your keyword research. Hitwise provides some great competitive intelligence and traffic data.
Kevin Gibbons

Read more about the the long tail of keyword research (and why single keywords are for losers).

71) 42% of people click on the top search result, according to one study.
Kevin Gibbons

72) Consumers are search-savvy and are now controlling the content in the search space.
Lasse Clarke Storgaard

73) Review trends and seasonality of target keywords.
Lasse Clarke Storgaard

74) Long tail keywords tend to have different components - such as actions, conditions, brand, model, color, location.
Richard Baxter

75) If you can filter keywords by groups you can create a robust keyword strategy that allows you to make decisions about how keywords should be implemented into content.
Richard Baxter

Link building

76) Add these books to your Amazon Wishlist: "Freakonomics", "Nudge" and "Predictably Irrational"
Kelvin Newman

77) Sometimes good content doesn't do well and crap content can do well!
Kelvin Newman

78) Webmasters sometimes think that they need a lot more links to get results than they really do. Sometimes a smaller number of good links is what's needed.
Kelvin Newman

79) If you do good surveys you should get some good links. Understand what has gone before and think about what kind of results that you would like out of it.
Kelvin Newman

80) Produce creative, compelling content and leverage community-based engagement.
Kelvin Newman

81) A link has to look 100% natural and it's really easy to make a link look natural.
Patrick Altoft

82) Ecommerce websites can use their images to get links by offering images to bloggers who need images. Just have a credit and incentivize hundreds of bloggers to use your images and you can get hundreds of links.
Patrick Altoft

83) Do something that has been done before but do it better.
Patrick Altoft

84) When reaching out to bloggers contact them and say 'What can we do for you, for you to publish this?'
Patrick Altoft

85) You can't really say a lot about link building in 12 minutes.
Patrick Altoft

86) Email sucks for blogger outreach.
Patrick Altoft

87) To get content ideas, run lots of queries, go to Yahoo Answers, look at social media sites - see what has gone before, see what people are asking and build content around it.
Pete Wailes

88) The execution of linkbait is very important. Fairly average apps that have been well executed can work well.
Pete Wailes

89) Target and attract passionate users. If your content resonates they will blog, tweet and share it on Facebook for you.
Pete Wailes

90) If you are remarkable in the traditional sense then people remark on you.
Pete Wailes

91) Pick up the phone. It can be more persuasive than email and a lot quicker.
Robert Millard

92) Try researching and connecting offline. There are lots of things like meet-up events that can be good for outreach work. You can always check out attendee lists before you go.
Robert Millard

93) Q&A forums can be good for outreach. Quora can be useful for finding less senior folks in some industries.
Robert Millard

94) Blog commenting doesn't really tend to work as a one-off. You need to do things gradually and engage. If you put a great tip as a comment, try using your Twitter handle in the post so people can contact you.
Robert Millard

95) Know who you're targeting. Find people using tools, be creative with searching and build relationships.
Robert Millard

96) If we want to become better link builders we need to look outside SEO to find inspiration.
Robert Millard

Try Wordtracker's Link Builder tool free for 7 days.

SEO

97) If you need to remove pages from the Google index quickly use Webmaster Tools. You can list the pages to be removed and it can take only around 24 hours for Google to remove those pages.
John Mueller

98) Use Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot errors on your website. You can fetch as Googlebot, look to see crawl errors, as well as control the rate Googlebot crawls your website.
John Mueller

99) If some of your web pages are broken in such a way that we (Google) can't extract links then this can affect the way Google will crawl your site.
John Mueller

100) If there is one website that is using a lot of server time for Google on a shared server then it may affect how Google crawls your website if it's on that server. Maybe move to a dedicated host.
Jonathan Hochman

101) Google has some stealth crawlers out there that check sites and do not show up as Google bot, so you don't want to have technical issues with your server so that it could ever look like it was cloaking pages.
Jonathan Hochman

102) You need to be able to control 301 redirects and custom 404 error pages on your server.
Jonathan Hochman

103) Use a Firefox plugin to check header codes.
Jonathan Hochman

104) Submit sitemap.xml to get accurate feedback on how many of your pages are indexed.
Jonathan Hochman

105) Use XML-sitemaps.com to generate sitemaps, or for bigger sites use [http://www.Gsite crawler.com(http://gsitecrawler.com/)
Jonathan Hochman

106) If your site gets hacked, your traffic will drop. Scanning only detects 30% of threats. However 'file integrity monitoring' detects 100% of threats.
Jonathan Hochman

107) Wordpress needs to be patched and checked regularly. Failing to do so can be a major cause of problems.
Jonathan Hochman

108) Happy visitors generate referrals, tweets, bookmarks and links. Unhappy visitors don't. Make your visitors happy.
Jonathan Hochman

109) Try and make print friendly versions of your web pages. This is especially important for high ticket items because people like to print out pages for items like cars.
Jonathan Hochman

110) Have a well branded favicon so people can find you, its useful if they are multi-tasking when looking at your website.
Jonathan Hochman

111) To check your page speed you can do so using Google Analytics or Yoast's SEO plugin for WordPress
Martijn Beijk

112) With one website we worked on we reduced page load time and Google then went and crawled a lot more pages on the website.
Martijn Beijk

113) Use MySQL memory tables.
Martijn Beijk

114) Apache has largest market share for servers followed by Microsoft IIS. With the busiest websites, Apache dominates.
Martijn Beijk

115) Anyone who is taking their business seriously should not be on a shared server.
Martijn Beijk

116) Beware of lazy programmer syndrome. Check the quality of your programming code to make sure it facilitates speed.
Martijn Beijk

117) A lot of the time developers are very confident but sometimes they don't really understand SEO.
Martijn Beijk

118) The biggest single problem that dynamic sites face is having thin content, no content or boilerplate content.
Richard Baxter

119) There is little excuse for not being able to produce 200 words of unique content for internal pages - there are a number of benefits including SEO and conversion.
Richard Baxter

120) Excessive duplication can be a major problem on larger sites.
Richard Baxter

121) Try and find better ways to address technical/server related issues than using robots.txt if you can.
Richard Baxter

122) If you are not ranking at all in Bing then sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools to check for issues.
Richard Baxter

123) Why does page speed matter? Google has announced "Let's make the web faster."
Richard Baxter

Local

124) Categorization is key for good accurate listings in Google places.
David Mihm

125) Aaron Wall has written a great article on Local.
David Mihm

126) Google wants to convert people before they land on a business's actual website. Google Product Search is being localized and you can now even make hotel bookings direct off some Google Places pages.
David Mihm

127) You need to claim your place in appropriate categories - use Google Insights to find the best category.
David Mihm

128) Each place you submit to Google Places has to have its own phone number. You cannot submit multiple locations under one generic phone number.
David Mihm

129) Citations continue to be essential for ranking well in Places. Its critical that your address data matches up everywhere on the web and you need to make sure Google can associate your website with your Places page.
David Mihm

130) You need a unique page for every location you operate from on your website so Google can associate that with the places page.
David Mihm

131) Websites with many locations should submit their relevant location page to Google Places so people can go direct to that page.
David Mihm

132) For Google Local submit an XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Central.
David Mihm

133) It's still important to do the basics when it comes to Google Local. Claim your listings at Google Places and categorize yourself properly.
David Mihm

134) Google Places' dashboard is not giving many insights, it only covers things like number of impressions, number of clicks and the statistics are not particularly accurate.
Martijn Beijk

135) 46% of smart phone users now compare prices in stores.
Philippe Huysmans, Microsoft Advertising

Penalties and suspensions

136) If you have spammy links and want to clean them up then take down link rentals, contact webmasters of other websites that have your paid links and get them to remove them. Document everything, even the emails you have sent, so you can show Google. In effect set up an audit trail.
Craig Macdonald

137) I have not seen any data that shows that just having a high volume of links correlates with a high ranking.
Craig Macdonald

138) We found that having a keyword or phrase in the URL plays a part in good rankings. The H1 tag is important, quality links and page load times are very important to Google.
Craig Macdonald

139) People try and cheat search engine algorithms because it's hard to build up good, quality content that will get distributed amongst the right social channels to help build up enough of the kind of links you want.
Craig Macdonald

140) Don't try to trick search engines. Make a great site.
Michael Wyszomierski

141) Google fights spam with algorithms (automatic). No readmission request is needed when your spam has been detected by the algo. Just remove the spam.
Michael Wyszomierski

142) Google fights spam manually. Spam reports are prioritized. Manual penalties ('hand jobs') have a time-out. Reconsideration requests can a get site suffering from a manual penalty reindexed.
Michael Wyszomierski

143) You know you've been penalized if: you get a message from Webmaster Tools; your site has been hacked; you bought a site that carried a penalty.
Michael Wyszomierski

144) If you have problems: check robots.txt and index tags.
Michael Wyszomierski

145) Use email forwarding from Webmaster Tools.
Michael Wyszomierski

146) How do you create a Google friendly site?:

  • Look up Google webmaster guidelines.
  • Don't try to trick search engines into thinking that you have a great site, instead make a great site users will like. That is what Google is looking for. If you do this you are one step ahead of the algorithm.
    Michael Wyszomierski

147) We use algorithms to tackle spam automatically as much as possible.
Michael Wyszomierski

148) If you are caught for spam that has been picked up by the algorithm then there is no need to contact Google. Remove the offending content and it will get re-crawled and re-assessed by the algorithm.
Michael Wyszomierski

149) How do you know if you have a spam issue rather than a ranking issue? Check Webmaster Tools as Google is sending more messages to site owners these days.
Michael Wyszomierski

150) Duplicate content is not a penalty. No reconsideration request is needed.
Michael Wyszomierski

151) If you get a message in Webmaster Tools from Google, read it and try and address the problems.
Michael Wyszomierski

152) Opt into email forwarding in Webmaster tools to get notified as soon as possible in case there are messages from Google.
Michael Wyszomierski

153) Tips for reconsideration requests: Note the previous violations on the site, don't hide information or give misleading information, state what the violation was and what you did to fix it. Be honest.
Michael Wyszomierski

154) Sometimes people think they've been penalized and they have not have been. Ask yourself - have there been changes to the market? Have algorithmic changes and updates deemed your marketing tactics less effective? Filtering can also occur ... and remember filtering is not the same as penalization.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

155) In my experience, in less than 1% of the cases when people think they have been penalized by Google, have they been.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

156) If your rankings have fallen: Did your server slow down? Did the host recently make changes. Did your engineers make changes to your website? Did you change your URLs, page templates or did you add new code?
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

157) If your website rankings have fallen it's possible quality factors on your website may have changed, you may have a high bounce rate, or perhaps users spend less time on your site or view fewer pages than average.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

158) Sometimes your rankings can fall because your competitors are doing more than you, getting more links, more social mentions and so on.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

159) Google makes around 500 algorithmic updates each year, which is more than one a day. However only the updates that seem to have a major effect get noticed. Like Panda.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

160) Manual penalties are the worst kind. You do need to apply for a 'reconsideration of your site'. However be polite, honest, say what you did wrong, and what you have done to fix it.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

161) Most search engines have an unwritten 'two strikes and you're out' policy. So if you get back in the first time don't do it again.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

162) In the pills, porn and poker industries it is very difficult to do SEO without breaking Google guidelines. But you should be aware of the risks and have a back-up plan in case your site gets burned.
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Analytics

163) Categorize the content type of the pages that are beating you. Eg, blog, Q&A, UGC (user generated content). Is this why they are beating you? Is there a pattern you can replicate?
David Sottimano

164) Categorize competitor inbound link types based on the content of the linking site. Eg, blogs, social, directory. Use this data to deduce competitors' SEO tactics.
John Straw

Social

165) Private Google profiles will be deleted by 31st July 2011. All profiles will then become public.
Bas van den Beld via Samantha Stratton

166) Facebook likes and shares: the correlation between pages that rank well and pages that have been shared or liked is high.
Bas van den Beld

167) Bing takes Facebook 'likes' into consideration for indexation.
Cedric Chambaz via Joni Gunneweg

168) Search for a brand on www.bing.com/maps in the Twitter search section to see who is talking about you and where they are located.
Cedric Chambaz

169) When looking at social signals as a ranking factor, don't look at it as "seo" rather sending quality traffic. Facebook 'likes' are far more valuable when sending traffic. Likes alone currently have no direct Google impact. However, Facebook 'likes' generate traffic which generates links which increases rankings.
Marcus Taylor via Merry Morud

170) The great thing about links in tweets is that lots of people syndicate their tweets on their blog.
Patrick Altoft

171) When something goes viral on Twitter you will get traffic from lots of referring sources.
Patrick Altoft

172) If you get a ranking boost after going hot on Twitter its difficult to know whether it's the tweets that did it or if it's from the links in people's sidebars.
Patrick Altoft

173) Digg used to top out at sending around 20-30k visitors in day. Twitter can be a much bigger referrer and go up to numbers of 70-80k visitors.
Patrick Altoft

174) Find more people on Twitter with Followerwonk, the downside is that it doesn't give you information on whether their site is good.
Robert Millard

175) Emails can sound bad if you're trying to engage and flatter people, whereas on Twitter there are ways to communicate like #FF, public lists and retweets - great ways to 'flatter' and connect with targets.
Robert Millard

176) Use hashtags to search for targets e.g. #haro #journorequest #journalistrequest "guest post" keyword "guest blog" keyword.
Robert Millard

177) You can use LinkedIn to find contacts by searching on Google site:linkedin.com 'target name'.
Robert Millard

178) You can do searches on 'LinkedIn' to see if anyone you know, knows a person you are trying to contact.
Robert Millard

Twitter ads

179) Every single week on Twitter there are 1 billion tweets
Martin Macdonald

180) Numbers of tweets per day have grown from 50m in March 2010 to 140m in March 2011.
Martin Macdonald

181) Listen to the conversation going on and then engage and join in if its relevant.
Martin Macdonald

182) When advertising on Twitter you can't just set it up and leave it like AdWords and Facebook advertising. You need to be retweeting people, replying to them, engaging with them.
Martin Macdonald

183) A promoted retweet costs $0.10 but there is no cost if their followers then retweet. So there is value in targeting people with lots of active followers who will tend to retweet what they retweet. Producing content/ads on Twitter that are not too commercial by nature and that encourage people to retweet, will tend to give you the best value.
Martin Macdonald

184) Twitter best for fast moving consumer goods, real time offers, viral pushes, time limited offers.
Martin McDonald

185) Twitter is not a broadcast media, don't just advertise. Engage, retweet, discuss, be human! Don't sell. Not a direct response platform. Sales messages alienate followers.
Martin McDonald

186) Twitter has three types of advertising: 1 - Promoted accounts ($0.50 per follower); 2 - Promoted trends (only $80,000 a day!); 3 - Promoted tweets.
Martin McDonald

Facebook ads

187) Facebook ads get more impressions, lower clickthrough rates, lower average CPC, and different conversion rates from Google ads. Facebook ads have 15% lower CPCs than Google.
Matt Lawson

188) Consumers exposed to a brand's social media are 50% more likely to click on a paid ad.
Matt Lawson

189) Maintain the Facebook experience. Don't send to site. Half of advertisers keep users on Facebook rather than try to drive them to an off-FB site. Maximize social endorsement.
Matt Lawson

190) With Facebook Ads, for a small amount of spend you can get millions of impressions.
Matt Lawson

191) When it comes to advertising on Facebook start with friends and fans, then related brands.
Matt Lawson

192) For Facebook ads use keyword stemming in 'likes and interests', then segment your audience
Matt Lawson

193) Images are the key driver for clickthrough rates on Facebook so they are important.
Matt Lawson

194) Use contrasting colors in your Facebook Ads. You need ways to draw people's attention over to the right. Some people have used bright, strong colors successfully. Designers' first instinct may not be what you want ... think about almost making it ... aesthetically unpleasing.
Matt Lawson

195) Every 2-3 days rotate your adverts so users do not get ad blindness.
Matt Lawson

196) Once people are on your website offer Facebook widgets on your website such as 'like' buttons etc as this will be something visitors coming from Facebook will be familiar with.
Matt Lawson

LinkedIn ads

197) The audience reach is much smaller on LinkedIn than on Facebook.
Merry Morud

198) Cost per click (CPC) is more expensive on LinkedIn than with Facebook. On average LinkedIn is up to 2x as expensive.
Merry Morud

199) LinkedIn can be good for branding. Direct calls to action don't really work. People don't want to be sold to on LinkedIn. You will get more benefit from a branding approach. Use the ads as an introduction to highly targeted segments ... the sale will tend to be down the line and the result of multiple touch points.
Merry Morud

200) Give until it hurts, do negative calls to action ... and then close with organic.
Merry Morud

201) At 50x50 pixels, image is very small compared to Facebook. So you need to use a bold logo.
Merry Morud

202) You can target cities and job types. LinkedIn allows you to enagage in micro marketing so you can write very specific ad copy to resonate with your audience. You can talk to the segment very specifically.
Merry Morud

203) With LinkedIn advertising you want to brainwash, manipulate, win!
Merry Morud

204) You can now target individuals in a particular company, and select by job title, age, gender and group membership.
Merry Morud

PPC

205) Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a good quality measure for Google, as this is sort of a crowdsourced answer to the question: is this relevant?
Craig Danuloff

206) The effects of Quality Score includes whether an ad is eligible to enter a particular auction, what position the ad appears on the Results page, how much you pay and what is the keywords' first page bid estimate.
Craig Danuloff

207) If you have a Quality Score below five there is a usually problem. It is a reflection of failure if a page has a quality score of less than 5. You need to go and figure out what the problem is.
Craig Danuloff

208) Quality scores of four, five and six tend to mean 'go to work' and seven is a good score ... it can be hard to improve on this.
Craig Danuloff

220) Penalties drop you out of display and make your clicks more expensive.
Craig Danuloff

221) Poor landing page experience problems for PPC include: slow load times, no privacy policy, little original content, too many ads, missing an 'About us' and contact info, and failure to disclose on email requests. Other issues can include pop-ups, bots and unexpected code.
Craig Danuloff

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