Last month, we discussed about some of the ways to find out whether your site has been penalized by Google or not. According to Search Engine Journal, Google is planning to apply few filters to those websites that fail to follow their Terms Of Services.

Above all, the biggest problem is that even some of the webmasters are completely unaware of the fact whether their site is being penalized or is under filter. There might be some duplicate content in their site or some optimization issue. The problems can be numerous. Here are 4 flags that might mean that your site is under penalty or filter:

1. Sudden Google referral traffic drop: Sometimes this sudden traffic loss is also accompanied by a sudden drop in page rankings. This may happen due to numerous reasons (may be the presence of a lot of backlinks in your site). If you are facing the same problem, think on this issue that may be, your site is being penalized.
2. If you query general search and a single database, then you may notice a lot of difference in rankings. Even a lot of webmasters are discussing about this issue in detail.
3. Your domain does not appear #1 for [yourdomain.com] search. If this is the case, then take this as a warning that your site may be under a Google filter or is under a penalty.
4. [site:yourdomain.com] returns 0 results: This is a serious issue. Try to resolve it as soon as possible.

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Filters By Google- Is Your Site Being Penalized?

As promised in the previous post an Insight into Microsoft adCenter here is the second follow up. Here we give you a deeper look into adCenter ad campaigns with tips to exploit it and get the maximum out of it.

Budgeting is very essential

A PPC has to be well planned. Moreover, budgeting with adCenter has become easier than before with campaign budget setting, "Divide across the month,".

The adcenter blog informs, “We have good news: The campaign budget setting, "Divide across the month," now better predicts how many impressions your ad should receive when spreading your delivery across the month. We've also added a new column to your Budget Summary reports, called Average Participation Rate (Average PR) to help you gauge how your ad delivery is filtered throughout the month.

Budget dividing can give you greater control over your expenditures, help give you consistent ad coverage throughout the month, and reduce the impact of click surges—which can deplete your budget and stop ad exposure before your campaign end date.”

Moreover, if you click on 'billing reports' tab in adCenter you will come across a feature which will inform an advertiser about the percentage of search ads are indicating and what exactly one may need to be in view at all times.

Know your campaigns well

The start of a campaign is just the beginning. Setup the campaigns based on objectives and the orders by topic.

Make use of demographic profiling

This feature gives Microsoft adCenter an edge over Google's and Yahoo!s ad serving platforms. So if you are not making full use of it you are missing out on a lot. Understanding the demographic profiling of the traffic that you wish to target is essential and also easy with adCenter demographics prediction. The reviews show that by setting demographics one is more likely to get clicks from those demographic profiles. Read about a case study conducted by webmetricsguru. which clearly shows that adCenter's demographic profiling works wonders.

Using Dynamic Text in adCenter

Microsoft adCenter permits marketers to indicate dynamic parameters in their ads. Use of upto three parameters is allowed.

Keyword insertion- place it in the ad copy title. The keyword the user used would automatically replace it.-
param1-is used to dynamically insert a keyword-level tracking code and landing page so you can report and analyze on a keyword level rather than just the ad or order level. 
param2-is a word or phrase that can be unique to each keyword and dynamically inserted in the ad text to make the ad more relevant, have correct formatting/capitalization, or replace a misspelled word.
Read more about it at the adCenter blog.

AdLabs tools
There are good numbers of tools at the Microsoft adCenter labs. These can help a marketer optimize the campaigns better than ever. Moreover they are also very helpful with the SEO. SEObook has a good account of all the tools available. Read more about them. These tools will not only enable a user to grab the right keywords but will also indicate the most favorable times to make use of them.

A/B split testing of ad copy and landing page

A/B testing is also commonly known as split testing. Split testing enables you to run several ads parallel and decide which one performs better than the other. Split testing is a powerful PPC technique.it is also not a one time process. It should be done repeatedly and repeatedly. Read more about Split testing at Marketing Experiments.

Microsoft reports!
Microsoft actually reports! They give updates of your campaign statistics on daily basis. It is very important to the check how the campaigns are performing. Keep checking the reports to avoid overspending or even underspending. Their reports are most comprehensive and very useful.

Landing page
This one is not just for adCenter advertisers but for all. During one of the session Ads In A Quality Score World at the ongoing SES New York most of the speakers stressed on the relevance of landing pages. Bruce Clay has given the highlights of the indepth discussion where at many places the experts stressed upon the relevance of landing pages. Bruce says, Search marketers need to continue to study landing pages to find out what works best for them. As Joshua says, it’s what puts the ‘M’ in search engine marketing. 

What sets adCenter apart from other ad serving platforms are the new level of analytics it offers the advertisers. The conversion rate is very good when compared with Google Adwords and Yahoo! Panama. If you follow the above pointers well there is almost nothing that can stop you from scoring well in adCenter.

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How To Exploit Microsoft AdCenter To Your Advantage!

Over the past one year of its launch Microsoft adCenter has grown a lot. Won't say that it matches up with Google's adWords and Yahoo's ad serving system but still it is doing a remarkable job.

A brief history, Microsoft adCenter was launched in March 2006 in US. It became live in UK in August and in February this year in Canada.

Some of the features that MSN offers its advertisers are remarkable as compared to the ones offered by Google and Yahoo! Joe Griffin at Search Engine Journal informs about the 'day parting' feature. Joe explains it as, “ Day parting is when you select the time and days you want your ad displayed. As an example if you sell B2B software you might want to run your ads from 8:00-6:00PM, whereas a real estate agent might be better served running ads from 5:00-10:00PM.”

This definitely sounds like a helpful feature. Even Joe sounds pretty hopeful in terms of Paid Search Technology. Joe also informs about other benefits of opting for MSN adCenter model. The beginners benefits starts with lower bid prices. Microsoft has lower bid prices as of now because of the less number of advertisers. The support offered by Microsoft is also commendable.  MSN asCenter also offers an excellent way to target demographically.

Also, 'it has just rolled out a new Quick Launch program designed for marketers spending $30 a day or more.' Adcenter representative on WebmasterWorld informs, “it's a program where a media specialist can help you get your campaigns migrated over to adcenter. You can fill out this form, and you should be contacted about 48 hours after they receive it."

Read more about user reviews on Quick Launch here.

Just recently Microsoft upgraded adCenter beta site. Joe gives an overview of some neat features. 

• Turning conversion tracking on and off at the campaign level is easy
• The interface as a whole is fast, but you may want to upgrade to IE7, as it pretty heavy on javascript.
• You don’t have to generate reports to export data. It’s real easy to export any type of date with MSN adCenter.
• You can turn on demographic targeting at the campaign level. Here you can select if you want male or female and you can target specific age groups. 
• MSN also offers a budget spread, so you can easily set a monthly budget, turn on the option to evenly spread your ad over the month, and sit back and watch your money go away evenly over the month and not all at once.

Mark Barrera also informs about some more interesting features of the beta site upgrades.

• Directly import your campaign structure from other search advertising programs into adCenter. Update your existing campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keyword bids and match types using a single Microsoft Excel or CSV file.
• Preview your ads on Live Search. Visualize how your ads will show up on Live Search with Ad Preview in the ad list.
• Search within your campaigns. Full text search allows you to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, accounts, or campaigns that contain all or part of a query string.
• Edit keywords in bulk to simultaneously change settings for all keywords or delete poor-performing keywords from your campaigns.
• Download your adCenter datasets into Excel with one click—making campaign management that much simpler.

Microsoft is actually trying very hard to catch up with Google's AdWords and Yahoo!'s Panama upgrade. The campaigns with AdCenter are easy and time saving. Moreover, they are cost effective as well. Infact, Microsoft enthusiasts claim that if you start right now you will gain a lot from it. Though many people complain of a lack of clarity and response with AdCenter. It also took Microsoft six months to make AdCenter compatible with Firefox. However, if for a moment we stop comparing it with Google and Yahoo! the kind of features AdCenter has introduced in the past few months have been appreciable.  

Microsoft AdCenter says:
Microsoft adCenter allows you to pay for your product to appear at the top of those searches. It offers advanced targeting capabilities, enabling you to reach the audience you want, based on the keywords you choose. This means your product gets seen by the people who want to see it – delivering cost-effective online marketing and an increased return on your investment. 

Microsoft is definitely putting in a lot of efforts to live upto the claims. If you are a newbie, it might just do you wonders to start your campaigns with Microsoft Adcenter.

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Microsoft AdCenter: An Insight (Part I)

Brandon Hopkins has compiled a list of 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007. Though this list contains some tips which are known to all, however, there are some other relevant tips as well. In all a great compilation and worth going over.

Brandon Hopkins says:
If “Content is King“, then links are what put that king on the throne. Build links and you’ll be able to display your content to the world. Don’t build links, and your King won’t have a kingdom.
Hopefully you already use most of these, but if only 5 of these tips get you a new link, that is 5 links you didn’t have yesterday!

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Link Building Tips For 2007

With the end of 2006 Yahoo! officially uncovered the commonly known Panama Update. Since that time the accounts are being upgraded from the older systems to this fresh system. Not all the accounts have been upgraded, however, it is expected the task would be full and finally accomplished by the end of march, approximately. Yahoo! Panama is definitely a welcome change.

Yahoo! Panama is surely a great improvement as compared to the previous one. A higher quality of searchers is unquestionably what Yahoo! Panama aims at. The new interface and ranking algorithm may involve a little bit of adjusting on the advertisers side. Scott on SEO blog has written an article, Yahoo Panama – Pros and Cons where he explains the benefits of Yahoo! Panama update:

• Previously you were stuck with only one live ad for any given phrase; now you can create multiple ads for a given ad group.
• Ad approval is now instant for most ads and keywords. While there is still a “pending approval” process for some sets of phrases, in many cases your ad changes and keyword additions are now instant.
• Under the new Yahoo Panama the options are much more sophisticated. For example, there is an option for blocking entire continents for your ad campaigns.
• The geo targeting options have also expanded to allow for more specific ad targeting. Advertisers now have the ability to target specific states and provinces – a feature previously unavailable.

Geo-targeting is one of the most preferred feature update of Yahoo Panama. PPC Advertising blog explains this as, “works by locating a user by his/her IP address or geo-specific terms in his/her search query. It applies both to the content network and the regular search network. Advertisers can choose to target an entire market region (the US and English speaking Canada) or regions. Regional targeting is broken further into either state/province/territory targeting or targeting by DMA”

Every coin has a flipside and so does Yahoo! Panama update. Most of the issues are relatively minor and should not be a major cause of concern for advertisers on top of their campaigns. The chief flaws occurs when one account is transferred from the previous system into the newly updated system. Scott gives an insight on the flipsides of Yahoo! Panama Update.

• Once your account has been transferred, the new system will not log any of the old system historical data. While this information is still accessible by logging into the old interface (which is made read only), it would certainly make more sense if stats were available under the new account login.
• Another issue campaign tracking. After the switch has been made, as long as you do not change any tracking settings everything should continue to work as normal; once you adjust the analytics or tracking options, you will need to replace your tracking code with a new piece of code provided by Yahoo.
• There have been some reports that after the account transition some ad titles, descriptions, and even keywords, have been disrupted.

PPC Marketing Guide says that though the ability to have multiple ads in Yahoo! Panama is the best feature, but Yahoo! has not included conversion rate into their ad statistics.
 The fields Yahoo currently reports on are:

• Ad Name
• Editorial Status
• Display Rate (%)
• Quality Index
• Impressions
• CTR (%)
• Clicks

Although you can tell which message is more appealing to your audience, has a higher click through rate, you don’t know if that message is costing you more that another message with a lower click through rate.

Yahoo! would now be able match upto Google's AdWords. Beanstalk says, “this is a great step forward for Yahoo! (at least until Google and Microsoft upgrade their engines and once again move ahead). More importantly, this is a great step for advertisers who were, until now, frustrated with the differences in capabilities between what they should do with Ad Words vs. what they could do with Yahoo! Search Marketing.”

Steps required in each campaign in Yahoo!
1.Log into your account. You will be presented with your account dashboard.
2.Click on the name of the campaign you wish to change
3.Click on “Edit Campaign” in the top right.
4.Click “Edit” at the top right of the “Campaign General Information” box.
5.Change the account name.
6.Click “Save Changes”.
7.Then click “Dashboard” to return to where you were.
Google AdWords:
1.Log into your account. You will be presented with the “All campaigns” view.
2.Click the checkbox beside the campaign you wish to rename and click “Edit Campaign”.
3.Enter a new campaign name.
4.Click “Save Changes” (also brings you back to where you were).

Not trying to project a negative image of Yahoo! Panama update, it is a job well performed. However, take a closer look! It takes seven step to perform a campaign in yahoo! And it takes Google just four. The multiple campaign edits might just frustrate the advertisers. Renaming the Google campaigns at one stance takes three step and one additional step for each campaign. But in Yahoo! These seven steps are required for each and every campaign.

The procedure might still be long but Yahoo! Panama update is attracting a lot of prospective advertisers. Getting around the new interface is a big improvement. The daily chore of managing a Yahoo! Search campaign will not be such a chore anymore. 

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Yahoo! Panama: What Everybody Ought To Know About It

Guillaume on SEOmoz has written a interesting post on 24 On-site SEO Checkups For Clueless Developers/Marketers.

The list of SEO on-site tips touches up the basics. However, Guillaume has rightly said that manty SEO consultants and web developers forget these basics at the time of launching a site. The twenty four tips will for sure ensure that any link building or link baiting effort gives maximum results.

Some of the tips are:

1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.
2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.
3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).
4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.
5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

Take a look at the complete list.

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On-Site Search Engine Optimization Checkups/Tips

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post "Tips on using feeds and information on subscriber counts in Reader." The post talks not just about the blog feeds, it talks about many sites, which have frequently updated content, resorting to feeds. If you have a feedreader for your site, you can get the number of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers.

We crawl feeds with the user-agent Feedfetcher-Google, so simply look for this user-agent in your logs to find the subscriber number. If multiple URLs point to the same feed, we may crawl each separately, so in this case, just count up the subscriber numbers listed for each unique feed-id.

You can also submit your feed as a Sitemap in webmaster tools. This informs Google about the URLs listed in the feed and heightens the chances of it getting crawled.

if you want to make sure your feed shows up in the list of available feeds for Google products, simply add a <link> tag with the feed URL to the section of your page. For instance:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.example.com/atom.xml" />

You can read the full post here and view the tips for publishers by Google Reader team here.   

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Tips On Using Feeds And Subscriber Data From Google

Lately, Michael Gray is busy  interviewing search engine experts on local search tips, tricks and secrets. Twenty interviews have been scheduled over a period of 5 days of which 8 are already done. The ones already done are that with Aaron Wall, Dean Bloomfield, Bill Slawski, Scott Smith, George Kepnick, Rich Skrenta, RC Jordan and Matt McGee. 

The schedule of coming interviews is as follows:

Rae Hoffman – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Justilien Gaspard – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Merrick Lozano – Local Search interview 2/7/2007
Carolyn Shelby – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Greg Hartnett – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Brad Geddes – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Mike Belasco – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Lyndon Antcliff – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Jeremy Schoemaker – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
John Andrews – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
Rebecca Kelley – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
Lee Odden – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007

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Local Search Tips From Top 20 Practitioners

Chris Silver Smith of SuperPages.com  has given some extreme local SEO methods which one can use for SEO of local business. Here are a few tips:

Your business should have some top keywords which are used by the users in the search engines when looking for business of your kind. Business can have informal names with keywords which would help new customers find them easily. Name your business having first alphabets as some local search engines show search results in alphabetical order. This means that persons who uses letter 'A'  to start their business names may get more prominence in search results than businesses names starting with lower letters.

Have your business near to the center of the city as some local search engines show local results according to the center point of the city area. If the business address is near to center point than local search engines may rank you higher in the results. Change your street address that have keywords relating to your business. If you are a big businessmen or has heavy political clout than you can have the street address changed that have keywords of your business and can be beneficial to you.

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SEO Tips For Local Business

There are several pitfalls you may come across while using Microsoft adCenter. WebmasterWorld adCenter moderator, Receptional gives tips for 'making the most out of AdCenter and avoiding some of the common pitfalls.' He writes, " My team went for a tutorial in London last week on making AdCenter work. I thought the notes that they came back with as to what they found relevent might be of help to people – especially those that suddenly find their ads in limbo, offline or entirely ineffectual."

The post talks about the Editorial Process; Acceptance Policy; Trademarks; Improving Your Campaign Management; Demographics; Reporting; and other basic tips. You can expect following developments in 2007:

• Behavioural targeting being researched
• Adcenter Accreditation (level grading)
• Management on campaigns
• Doing a photo version of Google Earth it seems. Not sure if this will be ready next year but it ables you to search your photo and find other people’s photos of that same object (ie Tower Bridge) which can even have a 3D map of it.

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Tips For Enhancing Microsoft adCenter Experience

Want to improve your page rankings on Live.com of Microsoft Search? A WebmasterWorld thread gives some tips to get good ranks for your pages on Live.com. The thread gave tips ranging from subjects like importance of content, page size and weight issues to importance of freshness and basic SEO principles. These tips are being debated at the WebmasterWorld thread.

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SEO Tips For Good Ranks On Live.com

SEO Egghead has compiled 21 top SEO tips given by Matt Cutts over the last year. The concise list includes links to all the tips by Matt Cutts on the subject of SEO in Google. According to Matt Cutts the tips will help you rank better.
The list of the links also include a summary which is a time saver. Some of the the tips are :

1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Matt recommends using dashes over underscores to delimit words in urls. 2005. Google does not algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url despite the fact that some have raised it as a possible heuristic for spam detection. I think WordPress pretty much precludes this anyway. 2005.

2. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/
Google takes action on individual instances of spam when they find it, but they focus on creating better algorithmic solutions. He states that he would not recommend using sneaky JavaScript redirects because your sites may get nailed in the near future. 2005.

3. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whats-an-update/
Google updates their index data — including backlinks and PageRank all the time. However, they export and publish new backlinks and PageRank data approximately every three months. New backlinks and PageRank are meaningless — it is not an update.  The information is likely already factored in for awhile before you see it. 2005.

4.  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-link-follow-up/
Google’s is against selling/buying links, and Matt indicates they are good at spotting them — both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines. 2006.

5. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
External (domainA -> domainB) 302 redirects are largely treated as 301s now. 2006.

Matt Cutts corrected this (number 17 in the list) advising to "use a 302 for temporary moves, and if a move is permanent, use a 301."

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Quick Fix : 21 SEO Tips from Google's Matt Cutts