Is It Too Easy To Pass Google Adwords Professional Exam?

I took my first Google Adwords Professional exam yesterday. I haven't run a campaign earlier since one of our client wants me to pass the GAP exam before running the campaign for his test. Most of you knew that I am really new to online advertising. I too knew that the exam would not be so easy for the newbies in online industry. I took it with the spirit and I managed to pass the exam with 80% of score.

Everyone might think that GAP exam is very easy to pass. I would surely say Big No! to this. It is not easy for the one who hasn't run the campaign ever. Most of them believe that the theoretical knowledge from the Google Adwords Learning Center would be sufficient to pass the exam. But it is not, since most of the questions need completely practical knowledge.

Now you may think that the questions are difficult, absolutely not if you have a better practical knowledge. Because some questions were so tricky and which were related to original market advertising. Most of the questions were easy, few were repeated and few from the quiz part of Google Adwords Learning Center.

The major part of the questions were from the keyword matches. I would strongly recommend to have the best knowledge on keyword matches to score better. And the more to be concentrated on the negative matches.

I would strongly suggest everyone to run a campaign atleast for a month before taking the Google Adwords Professional exam.

I would like to drop some questions which I came over:

Which keyword list is best targeted for a gourmet chocolate store that specializes in upscale chocolates for the holidays?
a)Gourmet, chocolate, recipe
b)-gift, chocolate making, chocolate
c)chocolate gift, wedding, gourmet
d)-recipe, chocolate gift, "gourmet chocolate"

What are some best practices for building a keyword list in a contextually targeted campaign? Select all that apply.
a)Include more than 50 keywords per ad group.
b)Use keyword matching options.
c)Use negative keywords.
d)Create a keyword list focused around a theme.

Which of the following ad performance issues are you UNLIKELY to see after you implement changes suggested by an AdWords Optimization Specialist?
a)A change in your conversion rate.
b)Significantly fewer impressions and clicks.
c)Significantly more impressions and clicks in a shorter period of time.
d)A sudden increase in the number of impressions on your ad on a particular keyword

These kind of questions are really easy so please make the exam great with practical knowledge.

Does The Bounce Rate Affect The Site's Google Ranking?

What is the bounce rate?

There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).

The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out where your web pages could be improved.

Google's definition of the bounce rate

The Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as follows:

"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors."

This Google definition already indicates that Google thinks that web pages with a high bounce rate aren't relevant to website visitors. If your web pages have a high bounce rate for a search term, Google might lower the rankings of your website for that search term.

Does Google use the bounce rate as a ranking factor?

Google has the ability to collect the bounce rate with the Google toolbar and Google Analytics. In addition, Google can measure the time between visits to their search engine by the same user and they can use the Google Chrome browser to measure the complete surfing behavior of users.

Last month, a webmaster performed a test that showed a significant ranking change as a result of a significant bounce rate change. The test is not very conclusive but chances are that Google really uses the bounce rate as a ranking factor.

The bounce rate alone might not be used by Google but combined with other factors, it could have an effect on the rankings. For example, Google could measure how many people start a new search for the same topic after visiting your web page. That would be an indicator that your website is not suitable for the chosen keyword.

What can you do to lower the bounce rate of your web pages?

A high bounce rate is usually a sign of a low quality web page. This means that your web page either doesn't offer what the visitor is searching for or the usability of your web page isn't good.

If you improved the contents and the usability of your web pages, you might lower your bounce rate from 75% to 65%. This would lead to a remarkable 40% increase in conversions (35 out of 100 visitors now stay on your website instead of 25 out of 100 visitors).

In addition to improving the usability of your web pages, you can lower your bounce rate by tailoring your landing pages to the keywords and ads that you run. If your landing pages offer the information that the searchers are looking for then you will get a lower bounce rate.

Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages has two major benefits: it's likely that you will get more visitors from search engines and you will get a higher conversion rate. The only exceptions to the scenario above are one page websites and web pages that offer very compelling content on a single web page (for example Wikipedia pages).

Search engines use many more ranking factors than just the bounce rate.

Golden Rules To Make The Keyword Research Great

Here I have listed important eight set of rules:

Be relevant
Make sure the keywords you bid on are relevant to your product and not hugely general. If your company sells ergonomic keyboards, then buying advertising on the keyword “computer” is not going to do you much good.

In fact, it will be costly and any traffic it does push to your page will most likely quickly leave.

Be specific
It may be worth bidding on some relevant and competitive keywords but you should also spend some of your budget on highly specific terms.

These are likely to be cheaper and, while fewer people will be searching for them, those that do are more likely to be interested in your offering and result in a sale.

For example, if you sell ethical jewellery then bidding on the competitive term “engagement ring” will drive relevant traffic to your site.

However, while those visitors may buy a ring, they have not expressed an interest in your specific offering. Searchers looking for “ethical engagement ring” have already expressed a particular interest in your product angle.

Be local
It can be a great idea to bid on localised searches – often people like to look for a nearby service provider, meaning that could be one more edge you possess over your competitors.

So while it may still make commercial sense to bid on the all-encompassing competitive term – for example, SEO – it is likely to be a good idea to also bid on a more localised alternative – for example, Emedia Search Engine Optimisation.

Be smart
The great thing about the web is that it is measurable. There is no need for guess work because many analytical tools exist to show you which keyword terms are the most successful.

Such programs will also reveal the bounce rate of a given keyword, allowing marketers to make timely decisions and to quickly move their budget to maximise potential returns.

For example, if you sell fancy dress outfits and bid on “Peter Pan”, then that could drive thousands of visitors to your pages.

However, if your analytics tools show 87% of those visitors leave straight away, then you can clearly see that this is not an appropriate term. Try adjusting it, maybe “Peter Pan costume” would result in fewer hits but more conversions.

Be sneaky
What terms are your competitors bidding on? Positioning yourself above your peers is an important goal, both for raising your returns and simply gaining a strong and authoritative market presence.

It can be tricky to assess competitors’ search marketing efforts but it is not wasted time. As well as flagging up keywords it may be profitable to bid on, their pay-per-click advertising may also give you an insight into the focus of their organic efforts.

That can help you reassess the focus of your own, to ensure you remain in the strongest possible position.

Be flexible
The importance of each individual rule depends on your product. It is essential you keep track of your campaign’s returns and be prepared to change tack at short notice to keep ahead of the curve.

Is Search Engine Optimization A Process Or Project

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is not a one time project, it’s a process. Similar to a garden, you must tend to it. Sometimes you have an existing garden where the weeds have grown over or nothing is growing. Sometimes you just have a section of yard you are going to rope off, till, then plant stuff in. Like a garden, organic SEO takes time and attention. It may be as simple as setting a timer to water or as complex as starting from scratch. Organic SEO is like a garden – if you don’t water it, it dies.

Soil Considerations

What is the history of the things that have been done to your website for SEO purposes?

Do you have pages chock full of links to websites unrelated to your company, where some of the website no longer exist or even some link to an “adult” website? Did someone hide a bunch of keywords the same color as your background at the bottom of the page? Maybe the site you are going to work on has commented out a bunch of keywords in the HTML code? (I know this is 2009, but some company, somewhere, has this on its Web site, right now.)

Sunlight, Rainfall and Other Factors

Traffic Analysis – Are there metrics on the company’s website? What kind of information can you gather from the statistics on what is going on with keywords, referrers, exit pages, entry pages, bounce rate, etc.? What metrics program does your company use?

We always ask our clients to install the website analytics program we use -

Hitslink - simply because it provides the measurements we need for our clients and also allows for consistent report formats for all clients.

What Plants shall we put in our garden?

Keyword Research - Gather the keywords out of the client’s current website metrics and obtain client input on what they think someone might type to search for them.

We usually use a method that I have used for many, many years. We ask the CEO, (get’s them involved at the top), the receptionist, the sales managers, the marketing director, the CFO and the COO (these two help get things done and also make sure you get paid) to provide five to 10 keywords each and not to share them with each other. This becomes statistically significant when you have different people come up with a keyword phrase more than once. Take these and put them into spreadsheets so we know what department wants what traffic and also to refer to later.

This is the primary keyword stage. You can also correlate what keyword terms got the most traffic and the lowest bounce rate to their Web site compared to what the client expects. Now obviously, you must factor in the fact that if the content doesn’t exist on their Web site right now, they won’t be found for it.

What kind of pesticides would be best to use to combat bugs?

Competitive Analysis – Look at the competitor’s HTML code, what can you observe about the competitor’s SEO strategy? Do they have one? What keywords are the competitor’s using? How do these differ from what the client gave you? Do they all apply directly to the client? Are the competitors using CMS systems, does the HTML code reflect the presence of another SEO firm?

These are the people your client thinks are their competitors in the business sector, not neccessarily on the web. Sometimes this works in your favor because the people your client thinks are your competitor may not be you, the SEO’s competitor, and as such you may rise above them to obtain market share over the competitor’s rather quickly.

What plants grow best in your locality?

Competitive Keyword Research - What keywords are crowded? What keywords are open? Does your client provide a niche service where very few people in the channel are doing SEO? Is your client a start-up, where the market is bare or are you going for terms in real estate or insurance that are very crowded already?

Audience Metrics - What do clients think of when they search? In addition to Web site metrics, what does your client’s customer think of them in terms of search? Can you obtain some of your client’s customers’ contact info? (say that 3 times fast)

Purchasing your plants

Keyword finalization - With the market up and down so much these days, if you tied your key performance indicators (KPI) to your client’s Web site traffic, you are indeed in trouble. While some people say keyword-specific search engine ranking is a poor measurement of SEO success, I would disagree and state that qualified converting keyword rankings ARE important.

If three out of 10 times a certain keyword phrase motivates Web site visitors to fill out your client’s contact form, then this is a qualified converting keyword phrase. The fact that you are number one or number 31 for that term is somewhat important to your client and their potential customers.

This is just the beginning of SEO. We haven’t even started modifying the Web site yet. Send the final round of keywords to the client for them to sign off on before you do your baseline measurements. Also at this point it’s a good idea to make sure to find out what the company’s “bread and butter” is and what areas it is growing in its organization.

Knowing this will help you pick your first keyword focus point for quick ROI and know what areas you are going to help the company grow in. The client’s expense for SEO should give them at least a triple return on its investment after a year.

Baseline - Where does client rank now in the search results of Google, Yahoo! and MSN for the agreed upon keyword terms and phrases? You can shoot yourself in the foot if you try and measure vague terms. Your best bet is to use what will make the cash register ring and track qualified keywords on a monthly basis to show progress. You might also want to measure the market share against the client’s specified keywords and show them a competitive market share baseline.

Landscaping

Planning - What needs to be done and who are the people to be involved client side and agency side? You don’t want everyone watering the plants at the same time.

Prioritization - What needs to be done first? What needs to be done last? This is critical so that there is no wasted effort or wasted expense to client. Is there a new Web site in the future for the company? Make plans so you are not wasting the client’s money.

Garden Upkeep

The biggest misconception in SEO is that you can “do” SEO once on a Web site then you can just walk away. Just like a garden, if there is no water the plants die.

The nature of SEO is simply this: Today’s rules or procedures may or may not work tomorrow. Google is usually the target we aim at for SEO, but that target moves quite frequently. Google, in fighting off the “bad people” who spam the listings, will change the way they rank Web sites often. By monitoring results on a weekly and monthly basis you can see which plants need more water or which ones are getting eaten by bugs.

Apply that to keywords that may be on page three of the results but need to move up because they are highly converting keywords. Just like you would get rid of weeds, get rid of bugs or change the angle of the hose for irrigation, there are steps you must take full time to keep your SEO growing.

Linkage and Niche Marketing for a Web Site or Company Channel – submit the Web site to Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and other places on the web where applicable.

Monitoring and Maintanance – observe statistics weekly, water the Web site where it needs it the most.

Baseline reports – Refer to your baseline reports. Did that plant have three leaves last week or two? It was one inch tall two weeks ago, but now it’s four inches. Report this progress to the client.

Bounce Rate and On-site Modifications - If you notice one of your plants is doing really well, give it some more space, more room to grow or more soil to spread out into. In other words, you can be number one out of 380,000,000 results on Google, but if being number one doesn’t bring the company business, you want to adjust your strategy. Change your focus to the keywords that convert, remove the weeds that are growing in your garden and prune the keywords on a page to come to a bounce rate of zero percent. Organic SEO, like a garden, needs to be tended. It’s a process not a project.

Making Money Online Is It Too Easy?

Is making money online is so easy? My answer would be may be or may not be easy. What does this mean? Ya, It is easy for those has who has learned the tricks of online and may not be for those whose is struggling in the online marketing without having the exact idea. People outside the online marketing believe that things are easy here. But it is not so until few tricks and bit experiences are obtained.

Here are the five tricks to make it out better:

1) Lets get this straight. Million dollar bank balances are numerical in nature. By that I mean a million bucks is not made up of 1 large million dollar bill. Its made up of exactly one million single's. Or to go to the lowest common denominator, its actually numerically made up of One thousand, million (or 1 billion) cents.

Make money fast and easy by thinking of money as numerical and therefore exponential. A dollar that you hold in your hand is the same as $1 million dollars. No difference at all. Its a seed that grows into a tree, then that tree spurrs more seeds. (I apologize for the metaphor, but how else can we put this so you understand the nature of the reality as it is)

2) When you approach your 1 million dollar goal, you are biting off much much more then you can chew thinking about that million.

To make money fast and easy always think small. Refine, refine, refine. Then duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Are you with me? Is this making sense? Make a simple little mouse trap, then make lots of mouse traps exactly the same way.

3) Find demand and supply into that demand.

To make money fast and easy, even before you think about "what" you will do, you are going to research demand. You will become an expert at sniffing out needs. This skill is a millionaires bow and arrow. Let me tell you, most millionaires couldn't hit the side of a barn much less the bulls eye. But they DO know this. So their aim is not important. What is important is that the target is nice and gigantic. How can they miss?

Trust me, its what millionaires do, its how millionaires think. Always supply into Fat juicy demand where the picking is easy. Do you want medals of bravery or a million bucks asap?

4) Have a structure you never deviate from.

They always failed to plan when they planned to fail. Once your research is done never deviate from it. Give it a good run but if it doesn't work out for you then move on without shedding a single tear. Chance and "chaos theory" are fascinating things. Probability is what millionaires deal with. They never delude themselves into believing in absolutes.

To make money fast and easy, you will not work backwards or second guess yourself. Plant yourself firmly in the middle of the road on the high side and go forward. Don't make it up as you go. Stick to what your demand planning told you to do. Many give up after 1 failure, but probability is a funny thing. We think we can control it, but even when all your ducks are lined up in a row, it may not work. But give it a chance and let it prove itself and you may find over a number of attempts you will get the results you expected.

5) Diversify AND Go deep.

They call out diversify when it comes to investing. Fair enough. Things change and relying on just one source for your income stream is dangerous. And it is. But there are two sides to every coin.

Is Link Building Is Just For SEO

In this post I’ve taken a step back from practical tips, to discuss something more strategic that’s been on my mind for a little while, regarding the occasionally skewed view of Search Marketers to think only in terms on rankings, and not broader website success - but this doesn’t by any means apply to everyone in the industry.

In many ways, the post is a précis to some research that I’ll publish here in due course.

It’s not what you do, it’s why you do it

The work that Search Engine Marketers do for clients can be fairly well defined, and has a clear value to them. By improving their ranking for certain keywords, we attract more visitors to a site - visitors who have expressed an interested in a subject relevant to the site.

However, there are occasions where building the search engine visibility of a site is not a suitable marketing strategy; if you want people to enter a competition or watch a video that won’t be around for long, then the site may be able to receive more visitors or a higher quality by referrals from other websites. Thus, linking to the site from relevant, well trafficked sites can be very valuable.

For the Internet Marketer (it should already be clear that I believe a a title beyond ‘SEM’ is required) building links for traffic can be rewarding, as well as a fun break from traditional thinking. Analytics logs will show you exactly how many visitors (and conversions) each link resulted in - this means you quickly refine your link building strategy to focus on the techniques that give most worthwhile returns.

Additionally, the close relationship between creating a link and receiving visitors means that the middleman (Google, with her impenetrable algorithm) is out of the equation. This means that you are suddenly free from concerns about:

* links behind logins on forums
* nofollow links
* image links without anchor text
* penalised sites
* links from bad neighbourhoods
* exactly on-target anchor text.

In addition, you can now buy links with impunity. They are just an advert (just make sure you nofollow them, to avoid impacting on the traditional SEO work being done on the site.) Again - given that you can assign an exact value to the visitors from each link, you’ll soon know what’s worth spending resource to create and what’s not.

2 Birds, 1 Stone?

So, the links we build are broadly either for traffic, or for search engine strength. In fact, in the ‘random walk’ model of link graph analysis, all links should do both. A link from a page with visitors will deliver some of those visitors to the linked site.

However, the web has failed to continue to work like this, in both directions. I will often place a link knowing that it will provide significant search engine benefit, but will barely ever refer visitors (e.g.: from a strong, but low traffic directory) and some links, such as ad banners, tweets and Wikipedia references bring traffic (and lots of it) but no search engine benefit.

A savvy Internet Marketer should be building links for referred traffic as well as rankings, because it will ultimately benefit the target website, making it more successful and profitable.

A savvy website owner hiring an IM/SEM should not get hung up on their search rankings or (god forbid) how many links have been built. They should care about - and judge their Internet Marketer on - the amount of high quality traffic that arrives at the site.

Does Commenting On Blogs Really Increase The Traffic

Affiliate marketers are often wondering about alternative ways they increase traffic to their own blogs and websites.

Blogging is very popular and it continues to increase in popularity day after day. One of the reasons blogging has such an explosive growth is because a blog caters to the people who visit it. A blog allows for the blog author to easily interact with their readers and also allows for readers to easily interact with the blog author. The most common way these interactions take place is within the comment section of each blog post.

Commenting on blog posts is an excellent way to increase traffic to your own blog, website, or even affiliate product landing page. The reason is simple. Please click the links in the comments to see who you are. By commenting on blog posts, at a minimum, two things happen. The first that happens is the blog author will click your link and view your page. The next thing that happens is other people who read the blog will do the same.

My advice to you would be to search the Net and find about 10 to 15 of the most popular blogs related to the product or services you are trying to sell and become very active commenting on these blogs, contributing, and becoming a regular within that little blog niche. You should invest time and get to know the other commenters and even visit their blog and comment on theirs too.

Doing this builds trust within the community niche you are socializing in. Also it helps spread your links within a related community, this is great for search engine rankings. All in all the more activity and more you contribute within these little related niche areas, the more effective your comment campaign will be. Ideally, it would be very helpful if you had a blog yourself, rather than just a landing page that promotes an affiliate based product or service.Since most of them say and I too believe that the links on forums has got less value nowadays. The search engines still consider the links from good blogs as backlinks.

What Is Google Saying By Reducing The PR Of Google.co.jp

IS Google trying to show that they are very sincere by reducing the page rank of Google.co.jp. Didn't Google knew this earlier? Or Why did they give this punishment only after it was said by someone else on their blog?

So many Questions pop-up into everyone's mind. First of all I would like to share that Google doesn't worry about anyone whether they buy a link by Paying per post or by Pay Per Click. Since the Crawl is automated in Google, it checks whether the link is having proper value is it related to the content. When these features are satisfied it considers the link as backlink or else it continues.

Google takes the problem in its hand only when it gets complaints from a third party. It just doesn't bring down the page rank as soon as they get a complaint. They register the complaint and there is a team which analyzes on the complaint. When it is proved they go on for the punishment.

So Google doesn't really worry on they type or the measure through which the link is obtained until they are forced to have a look on it.

Now another question may arise, whenever a site goes low by PageRank is it a punishment?Absolutely No! sometimes it happens naturally when some of the old links which gives the PR juice are no longer there or removed the link or some of the PR backlinks are devalued and so on.

Videos Are Being Concentrated More For SEO Purposes

While efforts to get Web sites onto the top page of Google's search results have spawned an entire industry, people are only starting to seriously consider the value of video optimization for search.

Google's "Universal Search" feature—which incorporates results from news sites, videos and maps right into the body of a search results page—was introduced in May 2007, but already one-fourth of U.S. Google searches (and more in other parts of the world) return videos in the results, according to a study by Nate Elliott, now with Forrester Research .

Video's Better Odds

Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages, Elliott found. Under the catchy headline "The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google," he blogged about some of the math behind that number. The study looked at 40 of the most popular keywords, and found:

"On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results—giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results—giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results."

The simplest reason for this finding is that there are far fewer videos than Web pages. But it's worth considering that U.S. video views have ( surpassed searches—there were 12.7 billion video views in November 2008 and 12.3 billion searches.

For more info:Go here.

Does Social Media Marketing Really Help To Improve The Search Engine Rankings

Social Media sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Delicious are highly authoritative sites which can dramatically improve search engine rankings if used properly. Any SEO specialist knows link building is essential to improving search engine visibility, but some clients have trouble accepting social media as a link building tactic.
Social media is only place where one can make people to drop in sometime on the information provided. It is the easiest method to get the enormous traffic to the site. One of my article on few social networks has got 200 to 300 traffics per day.
But one must make sure that you just doesn't spam the Social media sites to get the traffic and backlinks. Give the visitor exactly what you want to give them.

Manual submissions vs Automatic submissions

The aim of directory submission is to create an enhance exposure for a web site, business or a service. Usually the more directories which have been submitted to ends up attracting more visitors due to the enhance exposure to potential visitors. If a person does not want to go through the time consuming process of submitting their web site into directories themselves, they have two options, one is SEO manual directory submission and the other is automatic directory submission. There are many distinct differences between the two, each with advantages and disadvantages; we will talk more about each one in this article. The person must decide which is best suited to them and/or their service.

Automatic Submission:- “Automatic submission” involves downloading a piece of software which will automatically post your web site or service to multiple directories quickly. Alternatively you can pay someone to do this for you; there are many web sites and companies on the internet offering to do this for you at a nominal price.

Advantages:- Automatic directory submission are that it will save the submitter a lot of time compared to manual submission processes and services. Also automatic submission services are much cheaper in comparison to people offering a manual directory submission, especially if you want the added extra of SEO aspects to the submission.

Disadvantages:- Automatic submission services are that they are usually much poorer quality than manual submission; automatically submitted web sites into directories are much less likely to be ranked and indexed. Automatic submission software’s are also very unreliable which can have the end result of many important directories being bypassed. I would especially not pay for an automatic submission software or service.

Manual Submission:- “Manual submission” involves visiting every directory one by one and submitting your web site or services manually over and over again. There are many people and companies who will take the hassle of this process away from you and do it on your behalf for a fee.

Advantages:- Manual submission ensures higher quality and a higher rate of approval. As websites get indexed faster through manual submission, they receive more targeted traffic. With manual submission, you have greater control over deciding the directories for indexing which helps in targeting any potential niche.

Disadvantages:- Manual directory submission has a small drawback which is insignificant compared to the rewarding results. Since it's a labour intensive way of doing submission, it consumes more time. It is slightly expensive compared to the automatic directory submission.