With the city rolling out the red carpet for big O’s visit downunder, we’re estatic to announce that our very own Jamie, a Digital Media Strategist, will be attending the afternoon show on 14 December 2010.
Rumours are swirling that U2 will sing a revised version of “It’s a Beautiful Day” appropriately renamed “It’s a Beautiful Sunny Day” and that the Queen of Pop, Britney Spears will stop by to share her personal pain of losing 30 kg after child birth.
Come back soon for Jamie’s own diary of her visit and the prizes she picks up.
In the meantime, we’ll all be wishing we were her.
Often, little thought is put into the initial structure of an SEM campaign. Needless to say, we don’t build a house without the help of plans and an architect. The same should apply for Paid Search Accounts. Google and Yahoo! are here to make money. They aren’t going to come knocking like the local building inspector when you haven’t planned.
A strong, well planned account structure is key to the success of any paid search campaign. A solid account structure will make it easy to expand and identify new trends within your industry, to apply budgets appropriately and assist you to take full advantage of search engine tools that reward well structured accounts.
Google: Broad | Phrase | Exact
Yahoo: Standard | Advanced
Broad match (aka:Advanced match at Yahoo!) is generally over-used, and other match types generally over-looked. Best practice would suggest to use: phrase and exact (standard) match for words you know work and utilise broad match to discover new ones.
Starting out? Don’t feel like you need to think of every possible keyword variation, campaign or the best ad. This will happen over time. It’s best to start small, evaluate performance and build from there.
For established Search Accounts; don’t be afraid to pause / delete. If something is under-performing, pause it and use that money to test some other keywords variations or maybe increase the budget and visibility of other campaigns that have performed well.
Themes should be focused around your text ad. if the keywords in an ad group don’t directly relate to an ad. Create another ad group. Themes can be categorised many ways – brand, type of product, size, high / low volume words. Always remember that the purpose of creating these themes is to maximise performance. The main focus of creating themes is so the best performing campaigns always have budget available to them. Other groups are for discovery, used to continually optimise and improve your SEM performance.
Generally speaking, more ad groups with fewer keywords are easier to manage. It also makes the task of removing poorly performing keywords a cinch. Ads should always be clear and relate directly to the search query. Highly relevant ads will increase the chances of a higher CTR% and better quality score. Use tools like dynamic keyword insertion and negative match to eliminate any irrelevant matches and make your ads highly relevant to visitors who search using long-tail keyword phrases.
Always have a separate campaign for brand related words. Brand words should be visible 100% of the time. Visibility is often limited budget and if brand words are competing with other more expensive terms. Always separate brand words from broader, more generic terms.
We all know search engines reward relevancy, in the form of lower CPCs and higher ad rank. A good SEM account structure ensures you tick all the boxes and if done right will mean everything is rightly relevant. A clear structure will allow you to measure apples to apples and help identify whats working. Invest the time in a good SEM account structure, this will keep you ahead of your competition, have you paying less and hopefully growing your profits!
Youtube is the largest hub of videos on the Internet today and allows viewers to watch almost anything, from sports highlights to one of Will Smith’s music videos. Making sure your video can be found is the difference between getting a couple of hundred views and reaching millions. Similarly to a website, video page content can be optimised to help search engines index and rank them based on relevance to particular keywords.
Tagging your video with keyword rich titles, descriptions and tags is a good way to improve your videos presence from a search perspective. Now the actual video content will become increasingly important to the way a video is indexed.
Youtube recently launched a new feature that allows you to upload a transcript of your video, which is then synched with the audio in the video. This transcript not only assists with indexing the video, but more importantly it allows deaf users to read through the video content captions and provides language support.
The example video below leverages this new feature:
The transcript of the video content is turned into timed captions on Youtube which are clickable and take the user directly to the position in the video where the caption of speech takes place. This feature enhances the user’s ability to skip to certain points in the video, rather than blindly guessing where the best moments exist.
Video Optimisation
This technology also emphasises the importance of optimising video content. While it is still important to optimise the headings, tags and descriptions, the captioned content provides yet another area for content producers to further optimise the video. While I have yet to conduct any tests I can only imagine that the words you use, especially within the first few minutes, will eventually have an impact on where your video shows for a particular search query.
Youtube has hinted that there is an automatic transcript tool in the pipeline that will decipher and generate a transcript on Youtube. Once this is in place, there will be no need to post your own transcript, although depending on accuracy, some may find writing their own transcripts to be more accurate than relying on the technology.
Whether your goal is to improve the accessibility of your video for the hearing impaired or garner a wider audience the words you use are now more important than ever and when combined with the right video tags, titles and descriptions should help bring you one more step closer to becoming a Youtube star.
