Wordtracker is one of the most leading and trusted keyword research tools available for online marketers. As they themselves mention, Wordtracker was developed to answer the question:
“What are people searching for on the Web?”

While there are many free keyword research tool available online, the results are usually very different from the results you get at Wordtracker.  The bottom line is “Wordtracker results are more accurate.”

If you’ve never used Wordtracker before ,  why not give it a shot. If you are unsatisfied, they have a 30 day, unconditional money back guarantee, so there’s literally no risk. You can also take their trial.

Visit Wordtracker to purchase a subscription, get more information,

or try out the Wordtracker trial.

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Now there is a specific strategy to target Google Ads on the Content Network, and choose Gmail as the Placement. If it converts well, you can even increase the bid for such placements.

Further, there is this fun-box at the top of Gmail – an area where ads get top placement. You can also target this area with a specific syntax in the Google Adwords Placement Setup, which has been explained by Google Media Planner Austin Lau in this detailed video.

Go ahead, try it out, and let me know of your results. I am sure it will bring you more clicks, and conversions than other channels.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, The SEO Bible

It is by far the most improved version and has enough capability to keep you working offline for a long time.

Check out some of the new features in this release. I personally was waiting for the Add/Update of multiple campaigns, which saves a bit of time if you want to do some quick changes to a number of campaigns.

Version 7.6.1 :New features

Matt Cutts has just leaked the information that Google has done another update. Widely known as the DEWEY update, this is Google’s major step to include Google Books results in the search results.

While we had been noticing the changes in SERPS from the end of March, this is the first “official” announcements from Google. It has caused major furore and the search rankings have been going up and down wildly.

This kind of major changes are expected every time Google does major changes without announcing… You can expect the same thing when Google launches its own version of Wikipedia. Currently, the Wikipedia results are omnipresent – almost the first in every search… but when Google brings out its own products, there always seems to be a major update just around that time…

You can read more as the story unfolds at
Screwy Dewey Update
Webmasterworld Forums

So now that Google Books results are going to show up atleast 2-3 times on the first page, this leaves only 7 to 8 spots for us morons to show up on the first page. Well, like it or not, there’s nothing much we can do… so get up and start testing & tweaking your pages to maintain your ranking and better it!

Lesson Learnt: Never become too complacent – even if you hold the top spot or first page rankings, you never know what’s going to hit you tomorrow. So continue to build those links, and continue to add new content to help you in the long run. If you rely on too much traffic from just 1 search engine, too bad. The only thing is to make your content so good and compelling that people keep coming back to you, pass your link around, and you build the good will that will help you survive the War of the first page.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, The SEO Bible

Before I tell you about Perry Marshall’s personal AdWords coaching “Bobsled Run” that begins September 25, I want you to hear from one of the students who finished the last run in April….

James Prout from Holt Michigan says:

“When I came on board and signed up for the Bobsled Run, it was just like you say, “your wife thinks your crazy for spending ‘that kind of money’ on a dream.”

I went into the Bobsled Run with high hopes and expectations because of some of the other testimonies in the previous Runs. They stated 5X increases and so forth. I was pretty skeptical about our business making a 5X increase in so short a time. But, I could live with a 2X increase. I actually said to my Wife, “If we can get a 2X increase in the next few months, then keep growing it from there, you wouldn’t have to go back to work in the Fall.” (background: my wife is a school teacher). Talk about pressure.

Previously, November was our biggest month ever at over $24,000. That was a good month.

However, January topped it at $25,600

Feb: over $30,000

March: $42,000. This was huge and about doubled what we were making before. We did it in only 2 real months of work.

I took a breather these last few weeks. Just this last week my wife gave birth to our third child. A little baby girl. Her older siblings greeted her into the family with love. Through all this, I couldn’t help thinking that because of the Bobsled Run with Perry Marshall, my wife won’t have to work outside the house anymore.”

James Prout
Holt, Michigan

Get the rest of James’ story (and literally a dozen others)

To your success,

Vinai

• No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar, which is much easier to access.
• Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
• The left sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
• Additions to the Sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

And Webmaster Tools is now available in 20 languages. In addition to US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish, Webmaster Tools are now in Turkish and Romanian.

Sign in to see these changes for yourself. For questions or feedback, please post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of Webmaster Help Group.

Cheers,
Vinai

This would be a major update to the Website Optimizer since its launch.

According to Google, “We’ve added the ability to create A/B split experiments. This new feature is designed to make it faster and easier to optimize your website, and improve conversion rates.”

Actually, A/B testing is ideal for testing different page layouts and see what works better than the other.

Once you have finished your testing, you can now “delete” the test, which was not possible earlier. This was the most requested feature on people’s wish list, according to Google.

Secondly, ad agencies handling multiple client account can now access the Website Optimizer directly from My Client Centre.

If you are new to Website Optimezer, there’s an online multimedia presentation that you can see to gain knowledge and get started.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can get in touch with a good SEO consultant to help you. Or call us to help you optimize your website and get more out of it.

Cheers,
Vinai, Editor: The SEO Bible

Most of the people I meet are paying $1 to $5 per click for generic keywords. And still the Click-through-Rate (CTR) is extremely low. Getting a response of 0.68 percent is considered very good in the Paid ads category.

To improve your mileage from the Google Adwords Campaigns, we have created a Free Adwords Expander Utility, which creates broad and exact match keywords for you automatically. All you need to do is to copy the output keywords, and then see your CTR increase.

Previously, the ads quality score, the average Cost-per-click (CPC) and the CTR were used to calculate the ad rankings. It was already tough with the quality score introduced some time back, but with this new change, webmaster and adword account holders are already seeing a downward spiral in their adword accounts.

The new criteria is to include the maximum CPC into account. Most users and clients I polled said that it was another way for Google to make more money, but Google maintains that this will help to deliver more relevant ads to the users.

Well, the change has already been put into effect, but it is too preliminary to comment on anything yet. I am myself testing several variations on my ads, and will post the results of my findings as soon as I find some conclusive proof.

Meanwhile, feel free to let me know what you think of Google’s latest salvo. Leave a comment here.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, TheSEOBible

Like most businesses, when I was introduced to Google’s Pay-per-Click advertisement program called Google Adwords, I was overjoyed. No more advertising in costly magazines and journals which hardly generate any leads. Here I only pay when someone is eagerly and actively looking for my product or service. Too good to be true… only pay for leads that click on your ad. So my ad can show for thousands of impressions a day, but I only pay for the handful of people who click on it and visit my web site.

And it was good too, because my business started getting leads that were hot – literally as soon as I started the ads. So I was happy… and I increased my daily budget on Google and increased my cost-per-click, so that my ad could rank higher up on the search result pages.

Clicks Galore…
And I naturally started getting more hits from this extra exposure. Getting 10-20 clicks and ever 40 clicks a day became the norm. My spending with Google also skyrocketed. As I became happier, I became complacent too… as long as I was getting more visitors to my site, I wasn’t complaining…

Until I got my latest invoice from Google. Boy, I was jolted right out of my seat. It seemed that Google had maxed out my daily budget times the 31 days in the month. I had got new business from Google, but I didn’t know I was getting this many visitors from my ad campaign.

A quick look at my Google AdWords campaign showed me a huge number of clicks over the past several days and weeks. The number wasn’t 20 or 30 clicks anymore. It was in hundreds of clicks a day. Funny, I hadn’t received so many quotation requests or emails from people joining our eMarketing Ideas Newsletter or commenting on our blog. Something funny was going on…

Content Targeted Ads Can Blow a Hole
Upon careful investigation, I found that people searching for my SEO & Email Marketing services had remained steady on Google. It was the Content Targeted ads that were blowing the hole in my budget. Everyday, I was getting close to 100s clicks on the content network.

Curious to know where these clicks were coming from, I started playing with the Google Adwords reports, looking for a way to find out where my ads show on the content network.

Google Ad Placement Reports
Good for me, as Google had recently introduced a new report called the Ad Placement Report, which shows where the ads are displaying on the content network. I ran the report for a month, and Wah! What did I find…

My ads were showing in thousands on a few good sites like About.com, my articles on eZineArticles are showing my ads too, but I also noticed that the most number of clicks were coming from a blog and a web site with a strange name. Well, if they are showing my ads, they must be relevant to my products / services. So I copied and pasted their URL on my browser window to see what these sites were about.

And was I amazed? These sites talk about gibberish, anything goes… the site is plastered with Google AdSense ads on the top, left, right and center. In fact, I had to scroll several pages to “find” the Content. which wan tiny, and not much relevant too.

The site had no Google Page Rank. If you don’t know page rank, visit our SEO FAQ section. And strange is that it had no Alexa ranking too. Next, I checked the domain for when was it created, and all the WHOIS information. Turned out that the site was registered about 3 weeks back, hosted in China, and was solely meant to display adsense ads.

And it was pretty clear to me that the owners or creators of the site were clicking on the ads themselves. Boy, I was angry. Very Very angry!

I immediately wrote to Google Adwords team about this site that was creating this massive click fraud. The good thing about Google is that they create a support ticket immediately, and told me that their Click Quality team will investigate it within 3 days.

Seems like their support center is moved closer in Asia, because all my support tickets were answered in the day time, and promptly. I was happy and within 3 days I got a reply back confirming my doubts. They found the site, and identified it to be a Fraudster, generating invalid clicks. They banned them for life, and told me a refund was on its way.

Although with a good ending for me, it was a harrowing experience altogether. I had reduced my Google advertising budget, and was spending much more time monitoring my ads in the last week than required.

A Lesson Learnt
This happened to us because we were too focused on managing our clients Ad accounts. We used to spend a lot of time tweaking their ads, increasing their Click-through-rate (CTR), and getting them higher placements. In fact, we had no time to spend on our own Google campaigns.

This was a good lesson learnt. There were many takeaway pointers for me, and would like to share with you too.

1. Never leave your Google Advertising accounts unattended or running on auto-pilot. Keep checking on a daily or weekly basis in the least. If you have outsourced your advertising to a Search Marketing (SEM) company, ask for regular reporting, and do some spot checks – ask for ad-hoc reports on clicks, content network etc. for a specific period. They should be able to provide that to you fairly quickly, and you can get a bearing of what’s going on.

2. Setup separate bids for ads showing on the content network. Typically the leads coming from the content network are not that “hot”, so you don’t have to bid the default set for the Search network. Of course, Google tries to keep your bid from the Search network as the default for the content network too, but you can change it only if you know where to.

3. Look for trends: how many clicks you get on a daily or a weekly basis – a sudden hike or plunge can point you to what went wrong.

4. Analyze all your previous ad trends for the last whole year, and write to Google if you suspect you have been a victim of click fraud and claim back your spent money.

Lastly, a plug for our own SEM Services, We are now managing Google Ads for a few very prominent business and professional practices in Singapore, and our clients are very happy with the results. If you would like to enquire about managed advertising on Google or Yahoo to get more leads, more “hot” prospects looking for your products or services, do contact us for a quote quickly, and get the extra exposure you need.

To your success…

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash
CEO, BrandRich Marketing
* Focused on Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing on the Internet & Email Marketing
http://wvw.brandrich.com