Last month I wrote about a few ways to use Google’s AdWords Desktop Editor to more efficiently manage campaigns in Google AdWords. This month I’ll share some of my favorite tricks in the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Editor program, starting with two of the same things I highlighted in Google AdWords Editor: advanced bid changes and copying campaign settings. Just like Google’s AdWords Editor, the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Editor lets you make changes to your adCenter PPC campaigns offline and post those changes live after you’ve had a chance to Q/A your work. The Microsoft Desktop Editor also allows you to do some bulk changes that cannot be done in the adCenter UI, so it’s a great time-saver. While adCenter Desktop program doesn’t have all of the functionality of Google’s AdWords Desktop Editor, it’s come a long way in the last several months. I’m excited to see what additional features they’ll roll out in 2012.

Here are three of my favorite tools in Microsoft’s adCenter Desktop editor:

1.       Advanced Bid Changes

If you find yourself wanting to increase or decrease bids on multiple keywords in one fell swoop, look for the “Change bids” button at the bottom of the adCenter Desktop tool. Note that you can only find this option in the Keywords tab for adCenter, unlike the “Advanced bid changes” option found in multiple tabs of AdWords Editor. (Fingers crossed, the “Change bids” button will soon show up on adCenter’s Ad Groups tab as well!)

To change bids, simply select the keywords that need adjusted bids, and then click on “Change bids”

As in AdWords Editor, the pop-up box lets you choose to increase or decrease bids by a certain percentage amount or dollar amount. You can also choose to “Set bid no higher than” or “Set bid no lower than” a certain amount.

2.       Copying Campaign Settings

There’s now an easy way to copy campaign targeting settings from an existing campaign and paste them into one or more additional campaigns in adCenter. The following campaign settings can be copied: Locations, Day of Week, Time of Day, Demographics, and Devices.

To do this, simply right-click on the campaign whose settings you need to copy and then select “Copy” from the menu. Right-click on one or more campaigns into which you want to copy the settings. Select “Paste special” from the menu. A pop-up box will then give you the option to “Paste settings only,” and any available settings will appear on the right-hand side. Select the settings you want to paste (in this case, “Targeting”).

Double-check the campaign settings in one of your edited campaigns, and they should match the settings you copied over – much easier than going in and adjusting each of those settings manually!

3.       Change Target Settings (Multiple Campaigns)

The trick above is great if you have a campaign that already contains the settings you want to add to other campaigns. But if you need to apply the same brand-new settings to multiple campaigns, here’s what you can do.

Start by selecting all of the campaigns you want to apply the settings to, and then click on the “Targeting” button at the bottom of the “Campaigns” tab. A pop-up box will appear that gives the option of modifying: Exclusions (websites and keywords), Locations, Day of Week, Time of Day, Demographics, and Device.

You can modify any or all of these settings, and they will be applied to all selected campaigns. This is great when you’re launching or modifying several campaigns at once.

The adCenter Desktop Editor is still somewhat behind AdWords Editor in terms of functionality, but if you’re spending any amount of time in adCenter, knowing the efficiency-based features is vital. If you have suggestions for features you’d like to see added in the Desktop Editor, leave a comment!

For more information about these Search Stars visit their websites:

• Bruce Clay – BruceClay.com
• Matt Cutts – MattCutts.com/blog
• Danny Sullivan – SearchEngineLand.com
• Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org

#10 – SMX Twitter Announcement by Matt Cutts

“Today we’re adding the ability to block sites directly to Google’s search results: http://goo.gl/bLPOq Yay! #SMX“

@Matt Cutts

#9 – On Site Speed Affecting SEO

“Keep your site load speed to under 4 seconds for a great competitive advantage #smx“

@acrylicwebsites

#8 – On Mobile Search

“GOOG sez 29% of Restaurant searches are mobile; 15% of Finance searches & 17% of Auto related searches #SMX“

@LocalSeoGuide

#7 – On Mobile Usage

“Performics: 6 to 9pm is prime time for mobile search volumes #SMX #1d3“

@gsterling

#6 – On Search Queries

“Microsoft: 37% of people who see ads in newspapers, outdoor ads and on radio will search for more information on mobile #SMX #1d3“

@GSterling

#5 – On Search Query Length

“Query length: 1 word – 23%. 2 words – 24%. 3 – 20%. 4 – 13%. Has been growing longer every year. More sophisticated users. #smx #1a1“

@LStigerts

#4 – On SEO and Social Media

“Twitter is a new form of link building. Now your tweets spills over into Google and Bing.” ~ @dannysullivan #smx

@PerfectMarket

#3 – Short Guide to SEO – “Be Awesome”

“Short guide to SEO – make something so awesome people will want to link to it. Repeat. #smx @mattcutts“

@magda711

#2 – On Mobile Usage, Part 2

“55% of mobile searches take place when users are at home, not on the go. #smx“

@Pamela_Lund

#1 – A Little PPC Trivia

“Very first Google AdWords ad? Mail Order Lobster. #smx #1a3“

@HappyGeniusWeb

Any great tweets we left out? Let us know!

(Shameless Plug): Want more SEO and PPC Tweets? Follow the Schipul SEM team @SemBlog

If you are new to SEO, these videos are a great introduction to the essential Drupal modules that will enhance your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. You will learn the basics of analytic metrics and webmaster tools in order to conduct effective keyword research for the best keywords for your SEO campaign.

Watch and learn how to optimize your title tags, meta tags, sitemaps and more using various Drupal modules. Also, according to the course description, you will learn how to “configure built-in Drupal settings to properly set up your header tags, content silos, menu system, robots.txt and Apache rewrite rules. You’ll learn to measure your site’s compliance and performance before laying out the next steps for your SEO campaign to maximize your site’s conversion rates.”

For more information about these Drupal SEO videos, check out the introductory video below.

1.) Introduction
2.) SEO Checklist Module
3.) Setting up Google Analytics
4.) Using Google Webmaster tools
5.) Researching keywords
6.) On-page optimization
7.) Customizing page titles
8.) Customizing menu paths
9.) Redirecting menu paths
10.) Implementing relevant meta tags
11.) Optimizing for local businesses
12.) HTML header tags
13.) Creating content silos
14.) Leveraging the menu system
15.) Creating & submitting sitemaps
16.) Controlling access with robots.txt
17.) Setting up .htaccess rewrite rules
18.) Testing standards compliance
19.) Importance of site performance
20.) Testing with SEO graders
21.) Conversion rate optimization
22.) Next steps for an SEO campaign
23.) Conclusion

Download the Drupal SEO videos here.

Let us know how you are using Drupal or if you need help optimizing your website for search engines.

Contact the Schipul SEM Team in Houston for more information.

Jen Lampton and Rob Bertholf from Chapter Three gave a basic rundown of SEO in Drupal sites at DrupalCon. You can watch their presentation on the session page if you’d like. Along with the session, they write a quick blog post to bring their holy grail for Drupal SEO (pdf) document. It reviews some of the best practices for common SEO actions and included what modules are needed for those things. I’d like to dive in a bit deeper on some of my favorites from that list.

One of the best features of the document is that it separates out what things benefit Humans (like you), and what benefits Robots (like Google). For instance, alt text for images benefits the Robots by giving some context to images, but it was really designed to benefit Humans that use screen readers or other accessibility aides.

Rob discussed this early on in the presentation and pushed the audience to only make changes that benefit Humans. If it only benefits the Robots, it’s probably a black-hat tactic. I could not agree more, and am thankful he highlighted this distinction. Aside from nofollow links, robot meta tags, and the robots.txt, everything else on their list benefits humans. So Human-only isn’t a hard a fast rule, but it should be the majority of your focus.

The majority of things that you would optimize on the site should make things easier for the user. This includes:

• A Consistent site structure (code and visually) and both XML and HTML Sitemaps
• Use descriptive Headings and Titles for your pages, articles, and other types of content
• Good internal Site Search and helpful error pages
• Alt and title text for images and link title text to add more information

There are a few others on the list, but those above are the most important for the Humans. Those are the basics, and should be used before any other tweaks are even considered.

After the basics are covered, you can start to get more focused on special things like keyword selection, link text (e.g. not “read more” or “click here”), and setting up patterns and defaults for your URLs, Title tags, and Meta descriptions. Much of this can be setup to be automated whenever new content is added, and overridden when you need to make a specific change to something. Finally, you can use some special redirect modules (path redirect and global redirect) to make sure your content has one specific URL.

If you’ve accomplished everything above, you are far ahead of the pack. Remember again that you should be optimizing for the Humans, and not just the Robots. Another recommendation by the Chapter Three team is to use social media sharing embed tools to allow for easy community sharing. This, like many things, is good in moderation. Use you Analytics reports (you installed analytics tracking, right?) to find some of your top referring sites and use those share buttons on your content. We use a ShareThis tool which has several options, but does not display all of them everywhere. It’s not the greatest tool, but it brings some balance.

Finally, I want to discuss the notion of active vs. passive content. Active content is stuff that may change often, and will hopefully be shared and earn linkbacks. A great example of this is a blog. Blog posts give you little bits of content that other people can link to and send traffic to your site. Passive content is generally pages on your site like your About or Contact page. They won’t change often, and while the may get some traffic, they probably won’t get many linkbacks. You will hopefully have a mix of passive and active content on your site. Doing this will give you different types of traffic as well as linkbacks for your site.

Thanks again Jen and Rob for sharing your knowledge and experiences.

IPED and IPEDS are acronyms that have quite a few results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, the other spelling brethren to the iPod do not have much meaning. Because of this, all three search engines show spelling corrections for those words and typically include “iPod” search results as well. Today, we still see this for iPud and iPid. And, immediately after the Apple announcement, we saw it for iPad, too.

This was soon corrected, whether naturally or through intervention, in Yahoo and Google. Bing is still showing results for iPod when you search for the new iPad. This instance appears to show a small flaw in the search engine algorithms. How do you quickly add a new term when it had been written off as a typo?

The iPad announcement is the most recent example of this, but many web 2.0 companies experienced the same problem. When companies began to emulate Flickr’s naming convention of adding an ‘r’ to the end of their name, it also confused search engines. Is Snappr a service, or is someone looking for a lawn mower. This is especially apparent when services first launch, which is exactly what we witnessed with the launch of the iPad.

What does that mean for Search Engine Marketers? It means that Google may have a bit more to say about brand names then we would like to think. Is the new product you are launching or marketing a typo for something else? Then you may want to think about a name change. Of course, a strong product can overtake the ‘typo’ designation as they iPad has done in Google and Yahoo, but you may not have the marketing gusto and hype power that Apple carries. If you have flexibility in the name, then do your homework.

It may be time to add “Googleability” to the traditional product naming guidelines. Not only do you need to distinguish your brand from others, but you need to have a brand that isn’t even a close spelling of another product. If I sold a product called a “pespi,” I would be in a world of pain trying to market it online.

We would like to keep the search engines out of these types of processes, and they want to stay out of them as well. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information.” No part of that says anything about governing or changing that information. The unfortunate truth is that online marketing is growing rapidly, and to keep up you need to capitalize on the traffic that Google and the others can drive. So, pick your product names carefully, and market the heck out of them.

SEO Drupal Modules

Pathauto – Creates automatic URL aliases based on patterns created by the Token module. Includes options for taxonomy, user, content types, and others.  This module is very flexible and allows you to modify the URLs for any page on the site.

XML Sitemap – Creates a sitemap based on the sitemaps.org spec.  Also allows for submission to search engines with the required api keys. An XML Sitemap is the best way to show the search engines of new content on your site and this module can create that sitemap very easily for you.

Google Analytics – This is a fully loaded analytics tracking solution.  Just imput the UA number for your site and the tracking code will be included on every page. Allows for blocking tracking on certain pages, tracking by role, downloads, and other metrics.

Page Title – Similar to Pathauto, but for meta Title Tags.  You can setup patterns for different pieces of content. It also allows the option for a user to override and individual page’s Title Tag.

Global Redirect – Creates 301 redirects for different urls on the same site, like node/1, node?q=1, and /about-us/. This is great for making sure you aren’t splitting your rank between different URLs for the same page. Global Redirect also makes sure your URLs are all uniform by stripping the final “/”. This is a great help in Google Analytics reports so you know that every pageview is counted appropriately.

Nodewords – This allows you set meta description and keywords for individual nodes and views. Newer beta versions also include the ability to add a meta confirmation tag for Google Webmaster Tools. This way you do not need to edit your templates or upload a file.

SEO Checklist – This module is a great place to help keep track of all of the above modules and more. There are quite a few things that can be setup to automate your site’s SEO performance. SEO Checklist helps you keep all of these things straight.

Drupal SEO Performance

Because of these wonderful modules, Drupal is regarded as one of the top performing CMS platforms for SEO. With the tools above, you are able to configure everything to run in the background, so you can focus on your pages and your content and not have to worry too much about the technical details.

Other CMS platforms are able to accomplish some of these things, but very few if any are able to do everything for CMS that Drupal does with these modules. The other SEO benefit is that as search engine optimization changes, the Drupal community can adapt and quickly update the modules. The Drupal admin system can notify you of updates to you modules to make sure your site is kept up-to-date.

Schipul offers custom Drupal designs and is also able to do Drupal development for the site of your dreams. And of course, all of this great SEO configuration is included.

Below is a screen shot of a search for the term Schipul. Much like the Google News search results you are now given a link to ‘Show options’

Clicking on that link opens up a few options on the left side of the screen

This will allow you to see recent content related to that term based on the time criteria. You can even sort by date or even related searches.

Ok, this is really cool BUT I want to check to the Wonder Wheel option.

Google Wonder Wheel

Oh sure its been out since May but it hasn’t shown up on the regular search page until this week. So what is Google Wonder Wheel? It is visual wheel image that shows you related search terms based on your term. Below is a screenshot of Schipul again.

Click on another term and you get another wheel

Google Wonder Wheel, Well So What?

I know you’re probably thinking to yourself ‘Well, Jason I really have no need for more graphs in my life so why is this important?’ Well I’m glad you didn’t really ask. If you’ve ever wondered what Google thinks about your site and its content this will give you a quick idea on that.

If you’ve built your site and you haven’t optimized your content you might be telling the search engines something completely different than you want. Run a simple search on your company and or keyterms and see what Google thinks is related to that. If you don’t show up your web presence might not be big enough or your site isn’t optimized. One way or the other you need to get that fixed.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Interactive Marketing Vs. Traditional Media

Sure this is good news for companies like us but it is very good news for you as well. Traditional marketing has been hard to measure, yes you see an increase or decrease in sales based on marketing campaigns but you can’t effectively track it. You just have to believe that your print or TV campaigns actually brought people to your business and that it isn’t some sort of fluke. Of course it generally isn’t but if you’re like me you want to see some sort of tangible number or graph that makes me feel good about advertising. With Online Advertising you can. This is because online is simply the transfering of data from one point to another. These bits of data are kind of like a delivery truck. This data can carry various things like tracking code and this is the code that lets us track many many things. The beauty of tracking data is that it can tell us, among others, which page on a site was the most viewed, which site or search engine users came from before getting to your site and most importantly what keywords they used to search for your site.

Learn more about tracking your site using Web Analytics Reporting

Forrester’s prediction that spending on Interactive will increase is something we’ve all known about but we haven’t had the numbers to back it up. And there are some impressive numbers;

• Search Marketing spend will double from $15 Billion 2009 to $31 Billion in 2014.
• Mobile Marketing increases from $391 Million to $1.2 Billion
• Social Media more than quadruples from $716 Million to $3.1 Billion or 34% of all Interactive Spend

Social Media Marketing – Where Do We Go From Here?

Impressive numbers but what does this mean to you? Well, if Forrester is right Online will continue to eat away at traditional media with Social Media Marketing taking up the biggest piece of the puzzle and if you aren’t already embracing that medium you need to. Social Media, although a huge buzz term right now, is being embraced by more and more demographics and if your company isn’t in front of them in some form your competitors are.

How Do I Get Started Social Media?

That’s a great question, obviously we can help you, but if you want to get started on your own ask people around you what they are doing. We’ve all heard of Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, so take the plunge and join them. My 64 year old father is on Facebook, it is no longer that ‘college site’ you have no use for. Twitter reached it’s tipping point before Oprah picked up on it so it must serve a purpose, right?

This IS something that needs to be embraced by you and your company. Age is no longer a difference. This isn’t the same as some young kid kicking your butt in a video game. You don’t have to be young to do it, you just need passion and that is something you need to be successful in any medium or facet in your life. If you don’t have passion then it won’t work for you but realize this: Someone else will take your piece of the pie if you are not watching and Social Media will be a BIG piece of the pie.

Still Confused About Social Media?

Here’s a fun video that explains what social media is and remember July is National Ice Cream Month!

More info on Forrester

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/07/interactive-marketing-nears-55-billion-advertising-overall-declines.html

Thanks to Flickr user Bill Ward’s Brickpile for the Truck image

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Case in point:

Yesterday, in my personal Twitter account I tweeted about Hockey being ‘the sport of kings!’

@TheOtherLeslie I'm talking about Hockey – the sport of kings!  Balsillie, RIM/Blackberry CEO is trying to buy a team
about 17 hours ago from twhirl in reply to TheOtherLeslie

30 minutes later the basketball team the Sacramento Kings start following me

Wow, I tweet about hockey using the word 'kings' and the Sacramento Kings follow me. That right there is a Social Media Monitoring FAIL
about 17 hours ago from twhirl

@rxmike replies to my tweet about the Kings following me

@deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 12 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to deneyterrio

This is where it gets really strange. An unofficial St Louis Cardinals Twitter account must be set on auto-pilot and RTs anything that is said about them. Their account Retweets @rxmike’s tweet

RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 11 hours ago from web

At this point I have figured out that account is on auto-pilot so I decide to do a little test. I in turn Retweet their last tweet

RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #
about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Sure enough the auto-pilot account Retweets it again but not before

RT @deneyterrio RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they …
about 9 hours ago from web

Surreal for sure.

So what is the point of all this? Well as you can see above if you are promoting your brand online in such a disconnected fashion as the St Louis Cardinals are you could run into some potential problems. Yes this is not the official St Louis Cardinals twitter account, I can't easily find one, but as you can see if you don't pay attention to your brand online you can run into problems down the road. If a team or someone famous follows/replies to you and you never visit their Twitter page you might think they are the real deal. In this case they are NOT the real St Louis Cardinals Twitter account but you should always be monitoring your online presence. Our tweets above raise the awareness of actually monitoring your brand online and thankfully we were not malicious but that might not stop someone out there that might want to harm you and/or your brand.

Steps to Take to Avoid Bad Online PR

First thing you need to do is have an actual person reply and retweet about your brand. The beauty of Twitter and Social Media is that it lets regular people connect with the companies/organizations/celebrities that they love. If you are a robot you will be treated like a robot.

You should also have other people in your company/org tweet as well. They don’t have to tweet about your company exclusively but they can occasionally. A ratio of 1 to 5 is a good measure, 1 company to 5 personal. If you are an employee and you constantly tweet about your company people will tune you out. The reason for this is people want to connect on an individual level. I know I am more likely to do business with someone that I have a personal relationship with or someone I know online that has always given me the time of day.

Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online

Twitter Search

All public tweets are searchable as business you should always be searching on Twitter to see what people are saying about you

Blog Pulse

Blog Pulse is a great search engine for Blogs. Type in your brand name see what people are blogging about you and/or your brand.

Technorati

Technorati is another great search engine to see what people are saying about your brand. Technorati is blogs and Google is to websites – a great search engine.

But This is a Fan Not the Real Team!

This account I am referencing is auto-tweeting everything that has to do with the Cardinals in Twitter and in doing that they run the risk of someone attacking or ‘flaming’ them online, even if it isn't their account. This type of account shows that Twitter and Social Media in general are not as free spirited as some might think. You can’t just put your brand on auto-pilot and expect the world to be amazed. Well, they will be amazed – at how vacant and distant you are.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com