“Web” alerts will become “Everything” alerts
Marcel Gordon, Product Manager of Google Alerts, sends an email as we’re walking out the door today letting us know that our trusty web alerts are changing.
You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results, you can change the “How often” setting to “once a day” or “once a week.” You can also change your search query. You can do this on the alerts management page (www.google.com/alerts/manage), or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings.
Interestingly enough, I’d bet that the reason they predict that this change will continue to serve the same results, or increase is because their results contain many more types of information, videos, forum/blog threads, news results, local business results, maps and, of course, web pages. The next step may indeed be to send videos and maps in the alerts themselves.
SEO Industry Standards
Talking SEO, is there a singles source for industry standards? I would like to find one?
- Joseph M. M / Omaha, NE
Standards imply that there is a right or wrong. This is a distraction from your goal. The standards you need to be aware of are:
1) Search engine guidelines from Google. As the big kid on the block, you must be aware of their guidelines.
2) Standards of your clients
3) Your own professional standards regarding the work you would claim as your own
Those should be your primary guides.
Aardvark- Increase Adwords Quality Score
How can we increase the quality score of keywords in google adwords?
- Kapil D. M / Delhi, India
2 primary ways to do this:
1) Improve the page that your ad leads to
2) Improve the structure and specificity of your ad groups and ad details
To address the landing page, make sure that the keywords you are bidding on are discussed in the text of the page. Follow basic optimization practices as well as building sub-pages for this landing page to discuss secondary, related keywords. This makes the landing page a more valuable experience to the user, which means they will have a “good experience” following their use of Google. This is probably Google’s primary consideration.
To address the structure of your adwords campaign, you want to try to:
1) Break down your keyword list into groups of 2-3 phrases
2) Make an ad group for each phrase group
3) With these more specific ad groups, make an ad for each of the 2-3 keywords in the group
This means that each ad is specifically optimized for a given keyword.
Now what follows is that, depending on how fractured your audience/keywords are, you should consider creating multiple landing pages and related subpages, such that the landing page is geared for an ad group or set of ad groups.
By aligning your ad group with your ads and with the landing page you link it to, you are working on ensuring that a visitor to google who sees your ad and clicks on it, reaches a page that offers them something valuable (information) and gives them the opportunity to learn or purchase. Doesn’t that sounds like a high quality advertisement? 
Aardvark – Business Key Word Search Rankings
How do you have your business come up under search engine key word searches?
- Amy H. 28 / F / Boston, MA
Depending on where you are in the process, here’s a quick overview:
1 ) Determine reasonable keyword placement goals
2 ) Make sure your homepage title tag, meta description and meta keywords have your primary keywords featured prominently. Add your primary keyword to image alt tags. (basic optimization)
3 ) Use your website architecture to highlight the homepage for this phrase
4 ) Make sure your primary keywords are present in your homepage text
5 ) Follow the same basic optimization practice on other pages of your website for secondary keywords related to your primary keywords.
6 ) Create an HTML sitemap listing the pages of your website
7 ) While you wait for the search engines to spider your optimized website, find related websites in your industry and contact them to see if they’ll link to your website.
8 ) Find industry directories, and submit your website to them.
With the above advice, you are addressing on-page and off-page factors, making sure your website discusses the keywords you want to rank for, and increasing your inbound links. These are the broad, critical factors that directly affect your websites ranking in search engines.
For more info, visit: www.SpiderGourmet.com. I hope this helps!
Aardvark – ads impression and CTR
Is there any offical tools to calculate the sites visit or ads impression and CTR
- Bevis C. F / Los Angeles, CA
Click through rate is a measure of impressions to clicks, so when measuring it on your own website it depends on what you set as your goals for your visitors. When measuring it on advertising, i.e. adwords, only the advertising website can tell you the impressions your ad received and the number of clicks on your ad.
Aardvark Question – How do I get a Website?
I am a doctor and want a website, how do I get this created and marketed? – Brian, Chicago,IL
Hi Brian,
The quickest, cheapest way to get started is to:
1) identify the primary keyword for which you want to be visible.
2) Purchase domain with that keyword in it, and hosting for your website (~$75/yr for both at Godaddy)
3) Setup Wordpress on your new hosting, pick a free wordpress theme and get that uploaded. Make sure you give your new blog the same name as your keyword-focused domain.
4) Add content to your blog about your chosen keywords
5) Do a Google local business submission
Then give it about 1-2 weeks for the website to get spidered and see where you rank. Apply SEO principles as necessary.
Feel free to give me a call to talk through this, I am EST so either right now or tomorrow morning. Once you’re setup, the advantage to Wordpress is that you can do most, if not all, of the management yourself.
All the best!
Aardvark Question What is S.E.O.?
Got this question from AardVark:
“what is Search Engine Optimization actually? Any idea about implementing this technique into your website? Need some answer”
My Answer:
Breaking it down shortly, it involves modifying websites to align the content with specific keywords for which you wish to show up in search engines like Google. To succeed with general keywords you must both optimize your website’s content and architecture as well as earn links to your website, preferably with your chosen keyword in the link text, to hope to score against existing competitors.
For more, visit www.spidergourmet.com
Can you do better in 70 words?
Use .htaccess to redirect non-www to www
This is the code to use in an apache server environment to redirect non-www requests to the www subdomain for your website.
Options -Indexes +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
### Non-www Requests to www Requests ###
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourDomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Use this to ensure that visitors view your website as [www.YourDomain.com]
