Craft A Great Headline

The first thing the typical user notices about a ad is the headline. Five times as many people read the headline than they do the description lines and display URL, making the headline’s ability to capture the user’s attention even more critical to the ad’s success.

Here are 5 tips to write a headline that elicits clicks:

1. The simplest way to write headlines is to include the keyword in the headline every time. But depending on your competition, you may have to dig deeper and try other types of headlines to set yourself apart from all the other ads that just simply include the keywords.
2. Use questions that arouse curiosity or interest. For example, “Does Google hate SEO?”
3. How to or instructions are another way to mix things up. Headlines such as “Better abs in 4 steps”, or “How to lose weight in 4 weeks”, can work very well in attracting clicks.
4. Tell a story. Crafting headlines that tell a story such as “How I lost 30 pounds without dieting” can also be quite effective.
5. Another attention grabbing tactic is to use headlines with the word “don’t”. Headlines such as “Don’t try another diet”, or “Don’t Outsource to India”, followed with “until” or “without” can catch a viewer’s interest better and raise your CTR:

Split Test Ads

Split testing different ads is the only way to truly craft the best ads appropriate to your business; watching the actual CTR results is the only way to truly judge which ones are going to be most effective. Every campaign is different, and no one really knows which ad copy will be most effective until the entire batch goes live and we can compare the statistics.

Tiny changes in the ad text such as a word change can lead to a big difference in performance.

Optimize Display URLs

Experimenting with how the domain name appears on the ad is another dimension to use in making multivariate ad testing.

Something as simple as removing or adding the www to your display URL is one of the more common methods of optimizing. A more useful tactic is placing keywords and/or the target location after the domain name to make the display URL more relevant to the searchers query.

Here is an example of an ad displayed for “Roanoke real estate”:

You can make ads with specific variations just on the display URL so you can see with absolute precision just how much any little change can exert any sort of effect.

Include Location In The Ad Text

In some cases, placing the city or state in the ad copy will increase click-throughs, especially on locally targeted campaigns. You can also experiment with the way the city or state is written, whether it is spelled out or abbreviated. Also experiment with the city and/or state in the display url, as seen in this ad that displays for “smith mountain lake va”:

Use Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are ad-ons that make your ad more visible, increasing click-throughs. Google Adwords offers several ad extensions, including:

• Location extensions
• Call extensions
• Social extensions
• Product extensions
• Seller ratings
• Ad sitelinks

Try Varying Punctuation

What punctuation you use in your ad copy can subtly alter the tone of your ad into something that entices a user to click. Sometimes using an ellipsis can be more effective than using just a period because the ellipsis will pique a user’s interest and signal them to click to find out more. Quotation marks imply an endorsement or testimonial, which also helps in persuading the viewer to click on your ad.

Spy On Your Competitors

In addition, scan the competing ads in your niche. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You can see for yourself what the top ranked ads use to get where they are.

Just keep the above tips in mind when optimizing your ad copy for AdWords. There is no substitute for split testing and the willingness to experiment and keep an open mind.

There are all kinds of ways for an SEO guy to find information about a domain name. Yahoo Site Explorer, a Google site: search, and a bunch of other search engine based tools can be used to gather as large of a list of links as possible, all of which may or may not still be pointing to the domain. Then, the SEO guy could visit each individual link and check to see if it still exists, use Google Toolbar to check the PageRank of each page, count the number of internal and external links on each page, check and log the IP address of each linking domain, and more in order to have enough info to run a decent analysis on; all so that the SEO guy could have a good understanding of the external value of a particular domain.

Alternatively, SEO SpyGlass can be used to do all the grunt work. It gathers link information from a wide array of search engines and tools, with international search engines/tools available as an option. It can then gather a wide array of info for each link. It will then analyze the data and even calculate a proprietary “Link Value” so that a beginner SEO guy can have some understanding of how good a link is. This SEO SpyGlass Review will look at just how well it completes this task.

Raw Capabilities

A large part of how well SEO SpyGlass works is a numbers game. How many tools does it pull from to gather links? How many different pieces of information does it gather for each link? Well, let’s take a look; here is a list of USA search engine based tools that SEO SpyGlass.:

• Google
• Google Mobile
• Google Blog
• Yahoo
• Blekko
• Dogpile
• Exalead
• Excite
• IceRocket

But, SEO SpyGlass has information for search engines from a total of around 110 different countries, meaning that it is highly unlikely that there is a search engine that you are aware of that can be pulled from automatically and isn’t in SEO SpyGlass’s list of usable search engines.

From just the URL where the link supposedly exists, here is a list of all the metrics it will gather for each link, in the order that SEO SpyGlass lists them:

• Title: The title of the page that exists at the specified URL
• Links Back: Whether or not the link exists AND is properly followed
• Anchor Text: Whether or not the link uses anchor text and what that anchor text is
• Anchor URL: What the exact URL of the link is
• Page PR: The PageRank of the specified URL
• External Links: The number of links that point to other domains from the specified URL
• Total Links: The total number of links on the specified URL
• Link Value: A proprietary calculation used to approximate the value of the link; useful for beginners
• Domain: The base domain of the specified URL
• Domain IP: The IP address and country location of the specified URL
• DMOZ Listing: Whether or not the domain exists in the DMOZ directory
• Yahoo! Dir Listing: Whether or not the domain exists in the Yahoo directory
• Alexa Ranking: The Alexa traffic rating of the domain
• Domain Age: How long the ago the domain was first registered
• Last Found Date (optional): The last time that SEO SpyGlass found the link listed in the search engine tools
• Backlink Status (optional): Whether this is the first time (new) or not (remains) that SEO SpyGlass has seen this link listed in the search engine tools, or if SEO SpyGlass no longer (removed) sees the link listed
• Country (optional): The country that the IP address of the specified URL is located in
• Notes (optional): An editable field for custom notes

Additionally, the following metrics can be enabled, and they seem self-explanatory:

Contact info, compete rank in compete.com, traffic according to compete.com, pages indexed in Google, pages indexed in Yahoo, pages indexed in Bing, pages indexed in Yandex, domain Google popularity (inbound links found in Google), domain Yahoo popularity (inbound links found in Yahoo), domain Yandex CY (inbound links found in Yandex, a Russian search engine), Digg articles from the domain, domain bookmarks in Delicious, domain’s views in StumbleUpon, domain Diigo bookmarks, domain social mention popularity (inbound links found in SocialMention.com), domain’s mentions in Twitter, domain’s mentions in Google Buzz, domain’s popularity in Facebook (number of times content from the domain was “Liked”), cache date in Google, cache date in Yahoo, cache date in Bing, cache date in Yandex, page Google popularity, page Yahoo popularity, visits to your site (from the link specified, requires Google Analytics integration), page bookmarks in Delicious, page’s views in StumbleUpon, page Diigo bookmarks, page Social Mention popularity, page’s mentions on Twitter, page’s mentions on Google Buzz, and page’s popularity on Facebook.

Furthermore, you don’t have to use this tool on your own domains, you can also use SEO SpyGlass to see what links your competitors have so that you can try to get links from the same places. All of this makes it a very powerful tool. A lot of competitive information can be gathered very quickly with this tool.

With such an extensive list of metrics that SEO SpyGlass can check for, it’s bound to fit the needs of even the most analytical SEO guy. And since SEO SpyGlass does all the number crunching for you, the information won’t necessarily be overwhelming.

Technical Concerns and Solutions

But a technical person might ask one very important question: “If it’s gathering all of this information through my internet connection, won’t my internet connection get blocked by a lot of these places? Especially Google?” Well, SEO SpyGlass offers the ability to find proxies to run through. A quick 20 minute scan of proxies found a total of 16 proxies with a response time of 600ms or less, of which 3 were located in the USA. And, if any of those proxies fail to respond during the scanning, SEO SpyGlass will just go to the next proxy. Only when all of the selected proxies stop responding does SEO SpyGlass automatically revert to using the normal internet connection.

This proxy rotation feature means that you can have 5 requests going to a variety of search engines, all from different IP addresses, and all at the same time. This alone can significantly cut back on down time as a result of being blocked from search engines.

In addition to the proxy rotation offered, it also offers human emulation options. These options include the ability to wait random amounts of time before visiting a search engine or going to the next page of a search engine. It also gives the option of visiting a search engine’s home page before continuing since a lot of human users do exactly that. These features can and will slow down the process, but these features are crucial if you have more than one computer on one internet connection that all need to access these search engines at any time.

Overall

By offering everything to everybody, SEO SpyGlass becomes well worth the one time price of $99, especially since updates to the system continue to be free after purchasing, meaning that the support for the search engines shouldn’t diminish over time.

Now, of course, you could do all of this gathering yourself. Why buy the tool when you can just go to the search engines yourself to build a list of links in a spreadsheet and then go and gather the info around those links that you wanted? Well, yes, you can do that, but it will take exponentially longer than using this tool. If you only need to do it once, then that might be ok with you. But, if you want to track progress over time for yourself or your competitors, you may want to run this tool once per week. Doing it by hand could take a couple days of constant attention each time. This tool will cut that down to less than a day of passive attention, meaning you can do a lot more in the same amount of time.

For the aspiring SEO guru, SEO SpyGlass is nearly a must-have.

Clearly, as the name suggests, SEOTool is a tool that is designed to help you make your website better for SEO. But how does it do this? Well, by scanning your website and telling you everything that’s wrong with it. You might be thinking, “that sounds wonderful!”, but there is a catch or two, mainly the unpublished price. Is it worth it? With so few SEOTool reviews out there, it can be hard to tell, but it’s time to find out.

What Does It Do?

It does what many SEO consultants would do. It looks through a website, page by page, and produces a list of problems that could be fixed to make the site more optimized, some of them more serious than others. It includes a baked-in concept of best practices for SEO. Basically, it takes a lot of the work out of being an SEO consultant.

What exactly does it do, though? Well, it crawls through a website, starting at the home page, and follows from one link to the next to discover more internal pages. It then starts measuring things. Does the page have a title tag? How long is that title tag? Is it too long? Is it too short? What about the description tag? Are there any odd internal redirects? Any other problems? These are all questions that SEOTool answers automatically.

You may be wondering what exactly it checks for. Here is a nearly comprehensive list:

• Missing head, body, titles, H1s, descriptions, keywords, or robots tags
• Multiple titles, H1s, descriptions, keywords, or robots tags
• 404 errors
• Dynamic URLs or mixed case URLs
• Noindex errors
• Slow loading pages
• Low text-to-code ratios
• Excessive CSS or JavaScript in the head or body
• Excessive page size or whitespace
• Heading rules broken (more than one H1 tag or heading tags out of order)
• Conflicting or invalid meta-robots
• Pages with relative links
• Homepage backlinks missing the trailing slash
• Missing anchor titles
• Image only backlinks
• Duplicate content
• Non-unique titles, descriptions, keyword tags, or H1 tags
• Matching title and description tag
• Titles or descriptions too short or too long
• No visible text
• Empty H1, title, description, keywords, or robots tags
• Bold tags overused
• Text links too long
• Too many links in not enough content
• Excessive external to internal link ratio
• Low word count
• Excessive page linking
• No text links
• Internal page visibility (most visible pages to least visible pages)
• Links to subdomains
• External links
• Nofollowed links
• Internal, subdomain, or external redirects

That’s probably a lot to digest, and it probably makes you wonder how long it would take you to dig up all this information for an entire website yourself. And then chart it out, creating sitewide linking patterns that could spell trouble for SEO. Days? Weeks? Longer? Well, SEOTool is banking on it taking you a very long time, making this tool worth a lot to you.

Pricing

You’ll find that pricing is not displayed anywhere on the website, and that’s for a few reasons. First off, you would have a clear sticker shock experience and probably wouldn’t look at what the tool is capable of. Second, is that the price of the tool can vary significantly depending on, largely, how many times you’d like to run the tool. That’s right, you don’t buy the tool, you buy individual runnings of the tool.

Well, what is the range of cost? It can vary from a few hundred per run if you run them very often to nearly $2000 per run if you run them rarely. Yes, it is very expensive. It can save you a lot of time, and only you can decide if it is really worth it. Many people find that it is, many people find that it isn’t.

Limitations

This might be the make it or break it point for a lot of people considering this tool. The first limitation is highly related to the price. You can’t just run the tool when you want to, you have to schedule it and pay for it each time. This means that every time you think you might want to run the tool, you’ll have to deliberate over whether or not it’s worth it.

The other big limitation is the number of pages the tool can handle. Supposedly, the staff at SEOTool is working to reduce this limitation, but right now, the tool can only scan up to 5,000 pages. If that isn’t bad enough, there have been issues in the past with the tool failing to run for 5,000 pages, stopping at closer to 1,000.

Extra Benefits for Agencies

If the limitations hurt, but you work at an agency, or you are an individual with SEO clients, this might help bring you back. Specialized reports can be generated using your branding and your wording for every part of what SEOTool finds. Custom branding and wording, as well as custom adjustments of what is “too much” or “too little” for many of the metrics. This customization can be worth a lot to anyone who has a need to put the best foot forward on an old client, a new client, or even a prospective client.

Additionally, the running of the tool gives the website an overall score. By fixing the problems it identifies, you can raise the score, giving you a very valuable measurable improvement that can be presented to the client to help show the worth of your program. The cost, however, is still too high for most individuals to afford, making this benefit more for the agencies.

Overall

With a great set of features, it’s hard not to try out SEOTool, if you can afford the cost. The custom branding is also incredibly useful, if you can get around the somewhere between 1000 and 5000 page limitation. At this price, it is hard to recommend to individuals, but agencies and organizations might have a lot to gain from it.

This review will follow this format: each type of report offered will have a description of what it can do and how useful it can be. Additionally, each type will use the information pulled for a domain that very few have not heard of: amazon.com. Near the end of the review, a couple of benefits and limitations that apply to all of the reporting will be looked at before the end of the review gives an overall opinion of the tool. First comes Organic Keywords Reporting.

Note: This is using the Pro (Recurring) subscription priced right around $50 per month.

Organic Keywords Reporting

Reported Number of Organic Keywords Ranking for Amazon.com: 9,979,995

Exported Number of Organic Keywords Ranking for Amazon.com: 6,822

The organic keywords reporting offers insight largely to the SEO crowd. It reports how many keywords the domain is ranking for, which keywords the domain is ranking for, and exactly what rank those keywords are at, or at least what they were at when SEMRush last found them. In addition to this, it reports the average monthly volume, the expected CPC (cost per click), an estimate of what percentage of total organic traffic this keyword brings in, an estimate of what percentage of the cost of that keyword would be if all of the organic traffic was paid traffic instead, a competition rating, the number of results that shows up when this keyword is searched, a per-month trend graph, and the exact URL on this domain that SEMRush last saw listed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). As an extra bonus, when SEMRush has it, they will also report on the previous position of the keyword.

This is one of the most detailed reports that SEMRush has to offer. It is usually reasonably accurate once it has found a domain often enough in the SERPs to include it in their database. This is useful for getting quick, large scale estimates of how a domain is doing in organic search, but it’s hard not to notice something; while SEMRush reports practically 10 million keywords, when you export the data to take a good look at it, less than 7,000 of them are actually exported.

AdWords Keywords Reporting

Reported Number of AdWords Keywords Targeted for Amazon.com: 2,595,211

Exported Number of AdWords Keywords Targeted for Amazon.com: 6,139

The AdWords keywords report dives head first into what matters when a webmaster is talking about paid search and SEM: the keywords that the ads are targeting. The information shown here is very similar to the organic keyword reports, except that everything is applied to paid search instead. Specifically, this report offers the keyword, the paid position of that keyword (and sometimes the previous position), the estimated monthly search volume, the estimated CPC, the displayed URL, the estimated traffic percentage, the estimated cost percentage, a competition rating, the number of results returned, and the trend patterns. Online only, the report also includes a link to show the exact ad being used. In the export only, the actual URL that the ad points to is shown.

This can be very useful for determining what a main competitor is targeting for keywords. What this doesn’t show is how successful that competitor is at targeting those keywords, beyond the positioning. A webmaster will have to use his own tracking to determine what keywords are worth the spend.

Competitors in Organic Search Reporting

Reported Number of Competitors in Organic Search for Amazon.com: 5,005,903

Exported Number of Competitors in Organic Search for Amazon.com: 10,000

The organic search competitors report is based on similarities in keywords ranking. It mainly looks at the number of common ranking keywords. It also considers how many keywords that domain has in the top 20 results, as well as the estimated traffic coming from those keywords and the would be cost of this traffic if it was from paid. Lastly, it looks at the number of paid search results the competitor has in the top 20 paid results.

The problem with this report is it tends to be far too broad. For example, Amazon’s main competitor is listed as Wikipedia, which also shows up at #4 for ClickFire’s top competitors. Due to the extreme size and scope of Wikipedia, most domains have it listed as one of the top 5 competitors. However, this report isn’t entirely off base. eBay is listed as one of Amazon’s top 5 competitors, which would be hard to disagree with.

Competitors in AdWords Reporting

Reported Number of Competitors in AdWords for Amazon.com: 143,022

Exported Number of Competitors in AdWords for Amazon.com: 10,000

This report mirrors the organic search competitors. It looks at common paid keywords, AdWords keywords in the top 20, AdWords traffic from those keywords, the price of those keywords, and lastly the number of organic keywords in the top 20.

Because these keywords are targeted by the domains by choice, this report tends to be much more accurate. Amazon’s biggest competitor here is a website called buycheapr.com, which targets a wide variety of products. Numbers 2 through 5 are nextag.com, bizrate.com, best-price.com, and shopzilla.com, all of which make reasonable sense.

Unique Adwords Ads Overview Reporting

Reported Number of Unique Adwords Ads for Amazon.com: N/A

Exported Number of Unique Adwords Ads for Amazon.com: 5,853

This report is simply a list of known unique ads that are running. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t even report on the total number of unique ads it found, limiting the immediate usefulness of this report. However, if a competing webmaster would like to see thousands of examples of how a competitor is attempting to target, this report has it. It’s just a shame that you don’t know what percentage of the existing unique ads are exporting properly.

Potential Traffic Buyers Reporting

Reported Number of Potential Traffic Buyers for Amazon.com: 200,561

Exported Number of Potential Traffic Buyers for Amazon.com: 10,000

This report is surprisingly similar to the competitors in AdWords report. It just swaps out the main sorting factor from AdWords keywords to organic keywords and requires that the number of AdWords keywords in the top 20 exceed the number of common organic keywords. The idea here is that a domain is naturally targeting the same words, but spends more effort on paid traffic, they might be interested in advertising on a domain that has similar organic keywords.

Potential Traffic Sellers Reporting

Reported Number of Potential Traffic Sellers for Amazon.com: 2,423,541

Exported Number of Potential Traffic Sellers for Amazon.com: 10,000

This is the inverse of the potential traffic buyers report.

Multiple Locations

SEMRush does its best to provide this information across a total of 9 different countries: USA, UK, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Australia, though the last 3 are currently in beta. It usually does have information across all the countries, but the USA tab almost always has exponentially more than the other tabs. That doesn’t make the information from the other countries useless, but it is still a limiting factor.

Global Limitations

It’s hard to miss a trend across each of these reports; the number of results exported is much lower than the reported number of results. This is partially due to the fact that the Pro subscription is limited to exporting 10,000 results, but why are some of the reports lower than 10,000? This is unclear, but if you need more information than the top 10,000 results for each domain, you might want to consider a higher level subscription which will allow more results to be exported. But, if you ever need more than 100,000 results, which is the limit for the most expensive monthly package, priced at $499 per month, you’ll need to order and pay extra for a custom report. Through these custom reports, all of the results can be exported; even all 10 million organic search terms.

Another issue is lag time between actual results and when SEMRush sees them. The worst offender here is the organic results. It can take nearly 2 months for a new website to begin appearing in SEMRush after it starts ranking for terms. Unless the domain is very large, the organic information is commonly around 1 month outdated. This doesn’t make the data useless if it is understood that the information is an estimate, but it certainly couldn’t be used for reporting.

Overall

If a blogger or search marketer thinks himself serious about keeping an eye on competitors so that counter-strategies can be formed and executed, it’s hard to beat SEMRush. For a beginner, the Pro price can be hard to handle, but once a enough income is being earned to pay for this tool, it tends to be worth it. However, if you specifically want to see how a competitor is doing well in organic search, check out our SEO SpyGlass review. If you want to see how exactly a competitor is doing well in paid search, you may want to read some guides about quality ratings, but beyond that, it is often just about bidding more for the most valuable terms.

Good luck!

Track SEO results at the deepest level

Since the ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to drive revenue, the most accurate way to track results is to use metrics that correlate most strongly with increased revenue. Tracking rankings is only part of the picture – rankings don’t reveal how many visitors or sales your SEO strategies have produced.

I recommend using a combination of rankings, traffic, and conversions to measure SEO results. Just go to the traffic sources section of Google Analytics to track how many visitors, leads, and/or sales have come from organic search traffic.

The below screenshot highlights:

• The navigation structure to find the organic traffic report in Google Analytics.
• The default view will show how many visitors your site has received from each keyword
• Click on the Goal or Ecommerce tabs to view how many conversions you’ve gotten from each keyword

Identify existing rankings to improve

Since the vast majority of searchers click on the first few search results, boosting your website’s rankings by just a few positions can significantly increase the number of visitors you get. For example, boosting your website ranking from the bottom half of page one to position two could multiply the traffic you get by several times. Just follow these two steps to identify current rankings you can focus on improving:

• In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources > Search > Organic, then export the list of keywords.
• Input the keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and run a ranking report.
• Look for keywords that are sending decent amounts of traffic to your site that would send significantly more traffic with a small increase in position. For example, keywords that are ranked on the bottom half of page 1 or lower, but are still sending notable numbers of visitors to your site.

This screenshot shows how to export a list of keywords that have sent organic traffic to your site:

Identify paid keywords to optimize for

Not all search traffic is created equal – factors like keyword relevance and commercial intent mean that traffic from some keywords will drive more revenue than traffic from other similar keywords. It’s extremely valuable to know which keywords will drive the most revenue before you spend time and money optimizing for rankings. This is easily determined by looking at data from your paid search campaigns. Just identify keywords that convert well and drive high revenue, and you have identified the ideal keywords to optimize for. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources > Search > Paid.

Identify top performing pages

Identifying your top performing landing pages can help you identify a variety of opportunities to increase revenue. To begin with, you will likely need to create a custom report in Google Analytics – a report that will allow you to view total conversions and conversion rates for each of your landing pages. Alternatively, you can copy this custom report I created.

This will allow you to identify the landing pages that are producing the most sales or leads for your business. Once you have identified your top landing pages, ask yourself questions like these to identify ways you can capitalize on this data:

• How can I drive more qualified traffic to these landing pages?
• Are there additional keywords I could optimize these landing pages for?
• Can I create similar landing pages to target additional keywords or audiences?
• Why do these landing pages perform so well? Is there anything I could apply to other pages on my site?

Chris Turberville-Tully is the founder and owner of Inspiration Inc., a Birmingham SEO agency. He has a Masters Degree in Information Architecture, 10 years PR experience and has immersed himself in the world of Search and Analysis. Chris leads all major client strategies to deliver real value.

Anyone with a website knows how crucial SEO is to see that all-important traffic, and it’s no different on the multilingual internet. What is different, however, is the research you will have to undertake to get the right keywords.

Unfortunately it’s not always as simple just translating your current keywords into your target language, word-for-word – different languages use different ways to search for their needs, and unless you’re aware of this, your hits will stay depressingly low.

If you’re optimising your website for a foreign language, follow these tips to make sure you get the traffic you need, whatever language your users speak.

1. Know what your target user is searching for

Don’t assume your foreign language audience is looking for the same things as an English language user. Abbreviations, slang terms and language-specific phrases are all to be taken into account. It happens in English—consider an American’s ‘sneakers’ to a Briton’s ‘trainers’—but one of the only ways to know these nuances is to be a speaker of the language you’re translating into (a human translation service can help you with this one). On top of this, multilingual sites are also multicultural sites, so pick out the best foreign-language keywords according to your target’s cultural interests.

2. Treat translation software and websites carefully

While software and websites such as Google Translate can be a very cost-effective solution to your translation needs, most of them are not up to par. Only a few will give you a comprehensive breakdown of precise sentence structure, and most are basic direct translations. If you do decide to go down this route, however, the best sites will put the word into a sentence so you can ensure the meaning corresponds with what you intend. Indeed, Google SEO guru, Matt Cutts, advises against using Google Translate to do the hard work for you, pointing out that you could find your finely-crafted website ending up as web spam.

3. Use a reliable source to do your translation

The best way to get an accurate translation is undoubtedly a human service. But don’t immediately dismiss this as being a pricey solution – there are many students or keen foreign language learners who can provide translation at competitive prices. A post on Craigslist is bound to attract plenty of candidates, but make sure you get proof of their previously published work to guarantee they are up to the job. The very best translation service, however, will be produced by a human living in the country of the language you wish to translate into. They can help you to brainstorm ideas and point out useful words and phrases known only to a native speaker.

4. Consider a targeted URL

One way to ensure you’ll be targeting people from the right countries is to invest in a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). For example, www.mysite.es for Spain or www.mysite.pl for Poland. Not only will it help your site(s) to appear in search engines within that country, if potential customers think you’re a local company, it’ll automatically help them to put more trust in you and your business. This can be expensive, however, so if this isn’t an option for you, then consider going down the subdirectory route. This fairly easy option involves adding another directory for your chosen country/language onto the end of your English language site (e.g. www.mysite.com/es). However, it holds no real benefit for search engine rankings, so should be used only as a last resort.

5. Keep it simple and use your keywords wisely

Over-complicating your keywords and phrases means you will only have more chance of getting it wrong and losing credibility. Certainly avoid branded keywords when fresh on the market – if prospective users are unfamiliar with your brand and your services then they won’t be searching for you. And you’ll need a good range; overusing too few keywords will inevitably frustrate the reader who won’t want to stick around to read the rest of your site, even if it is in their language. You can check you have the right amount of keywords on any URL using a keyword density tool.

6. Don’t forget about key phrases

As well as a good selection of primary keywords, you should also include some phrases/long tail keywords to bring in extra traffic, but proceed with caution. Dealing with more than just a single word makes correct sentence construction and word order highly important to avoid garbled ‘Spanglish’ text. Do remember to take a look at the kind of keyword phrases your (successful!) foreign competitors are using and tailor your text accordingly—you need to be aiming for the highest number of clicks against the lowest competition from others on the web.

7. Test, test and test again

Using tests and tools to see which foreign language phrases work best for you could really help get your website off the ground, particularly if it’s in a niche area, a complicated language or is a fledgling brand. There are plenty out there to see how many search results your keywords get – there’s no need to rely just on Google AdWords—the  Keyword Discovery is a great resource. Tracking the success of your multilingual keyword campaign is similar to your English language strategy—you’ll still need to take into account the click-throughs and conversions from search engines, but you’ll need to do it on a larger scale and across several search engines. While Google may reign supreme in the USA, Yandex is the search engine of choice in Russia.

Above all, remember that one slip-up in translating a phrase or main keyword could mean disappointing results. So don’t trip over your translations – with the right approach, a multilingual website can bring in all the clicks you need to boost your rankings.

About the author
Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over sixty million words for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Christian (@l24ca) and Lingo24 (@Lingo24) on Twitter.

a SEO tactic whereby numerous unique versions of an original article are automatically generated by searching and replacing keywords and phrases, but that does not make sense to the human eye.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t read as much as you’d like. Call me prejudiced, but when I read, I like to read works that are written by humans. I won’t call out the source, but I stumbled the above phrase while strolling through a neighbor’s content farm. Do you think the above was written by a human? Someone or something totally missed the point.

Notice the first sentence in the bullet point. Note the capitalization. How should the sentence have read?

Search, Relevance, and UGC

Nearly all of Google’s revenue comes from Adwords, but Google is so much more than just a search engine. The company’s mission statement, after all, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Search might provide a platform (and revenue model) for indexing everything that’s online, but what Google really wants to become is the go-to cloud-based app for the entirety of human knowledge — i.e. the how-to and what-is guide for everything.

But Google’s algorithm update also happened to napalm certain content farms and competitors. Indeed, when you look at the top 25 losers, you notice that Google seems to have devalued user-generated-content (UGC).

This represents a significant shift in Google’s approach to content because, traditionally, Google has been partial to UGC. The logic behind their UGC bias, moreover, seemed sound because UGC doesn’t have the same vested interests as so-called “commercial” sites.

Whereas commercial sites produce content (and link to other sites) for the purpose of creating revenue, UGC is more about actual people/users sharing their opinions and experience through content because they find it useful. We are, after all, social creatures, and since Google wants to give the most valuable results to real human beings, UGC seemed like a promising resource to help them do that.

But then you look at the top 25 sites to lose out from Google’s latest algorithm update, and you notice just how many of them are UGC-driven. From shopping sites powered by user-reviews to article submission sites, many of these losers had built their business model on UGC to the extent that they leveraged it to rank well in the SERPs and attract new users/customers.

Source: Search Metrics

Of course, these sites had found a loophole in the Google algorithm and were exploiting it. In other words, their revenue models were (on one way or another) piggybacking off of Google’s own technology and user-base. But depending on just how altruisitc you are about content and search, some of these sites deserved to penalized, and some didn’t.

On the less extreme end of the spectrum, there were the sites that were leveraging Google’s preference for UGC and how-to content to generate traffic that they could then monetize. One example is TheFind.com which used user-reviews to rank better on product searches, and then make a commission on the users they then referred to various online merchants.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, sites were actually incentivizing users to generate content content. These sites were more problematic because UGC loses its value when its incentivized. Basically, if there’s something in it for the user to produce the content, the motive behind the content becomes less altruistic and it becomes that much less likely that the content is actually share-worthy.

Search and the Changing Face of UGC

So what does this all mean for the future of UGC and search? Well, it depends on which search engine we’re talking about.

Most UGC these days is being produced on social networks, not on content sites. It’s coming in the form of tweets and wall-posts and likes. This is even more valuable as “altruistic” UGC because (1) it’s being created at a much higher volume, and (2) it’s more closely tied to “real” user identities and less likely to be spam.

The only problem is that most of it is happening on Facebook, and Google can’t get at it there That is, its crawlers can’t get in behind the Facebook registration wall, so they can’t see what’s happening there and factor it into their index.

Bing, on the other hand, has a deal with Facebook, and is actively factoring data such as Facebook Likes into its index. Specifically, it’s able to personalize your search results based on (1) how much something has been liked on Facebook, and (2) how much it’s been liked by people in your network.

This, of course, gives Bing a significant edge over Google in offering a “social” kind of search. But the real point is that as search evolves, the kinds of UGC that are going to matter is going to be the stuff that social graphs are made up of. It’s going to be about the content (1) real users have produced, and (2) how what each user has produced can be used to personalize their own search experience.

Hey SEO’s, what’s wrong with this Google AdSense advertisement? Don’t you love the way that two businesses have to co-exist on the same Google AdSense ad? One way to avoid SEO malpractice is to restrain yourself from the practice of guaranteed SEO:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.

Perhaps the above quote from the Google Search Engine Optimization Guidelines should read No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google except a Google advertiser.

The Yahoo Toolbar, of course, has a lot of features. Some of which you will probably expect by now. Bookmarks, Yahoo Mail, a quick Yahoo search bar, and quick links to a bunch of Yahoo websites (Games, Finance, Music, Sports, etc.) are all there right out of the gate. Another feature that is available immediately but isn’t enabled by default is the pop-up blocker, which is as effective as you would expect. It catches most, but not all, popups. Some features it provides are a little less expected, though.

The biggest new thing in Yahoo’s toolbar is the built in Anti-Spy tool. It’s not a full anti-virus program, so it’s not going to catch and delete a hardcore trojan virus sitting on your computer, but it will catch just about any spy-ware or ad-ware, which are generally used to spy on your behavior, sometimes to force specific ads on you and sometimes to attempt to steal private information from you (like credit card information). However, this anti-spy-ware program isn’t ready immediately after installing the toolbar. The first time you try to run Anti-Spy, you’ll be greeted with a pop-up that asks you to install the program. The installation is relatively painless, and once you install it, it’s good to go.

Installation is pretty straightforward. Just go to this address: http://toolbar.yahoo.com/ where you’ll find the Yahoo Toolbar download. Then, click the Download Now button to download Yahoo Toolbar. It will come up with a bunch of options that clearly states the changes it will make before you choose to install it. This is very important, because some toolbars won’t tell you that you are about to change your default search engine, and it’s not always easy to change it back.

Click the “I agree” button and it will install Yahoo Toolbar for you. Just follow the directions it gives you on-screen. There will most likely be a bunch of buttons to press if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, but you can just keep clicking on “allow”, “run”, or “ok” and it should go through correctly. Sometimes on installation, Windows will think that it didn’t install correctly and ask if you want to re-install it. Don’t re-install it this way, it probably just isn’t done installing. This mess of pop-ups is probably the worst part about the toolbar, but these pop-ups are due to Windows, not the toolbar, so it’s hard to blame the toolbar for it.

Once installed, it will display a bunch of convenient options that allow you to customize the toolbar as you want it:

If you don’t know what you want yet, there is a + sign next to the buttons that allows you to easily add more anytime you want.

Yahoo Toolbar holds up pretty well against Google Toolbar. At it’s default installation, and without changing anything, Yahoo Toolbar actually has quite a few more things you can do with it. Granted, it’s pretty easy to add extra buttons or apps to either toolbar, but for the beginning user, they might just stick with what’s there to begin with, and Yahoo has more of it.

If you’re a more advanced user, almost everything that can be done with one can be done with the other, so it might boil down to which search engine you prefer. They both have plenty to offer functionality-wise.

Pros: Lots of functionality, anti-spyware program built in, customizable without logging in to Yahoo

Cons: Forces you to be stuck with a Yahoo search bar whether you like it or not

Overall: An excellent toolbar. Even if you don’t like Yahoo’s search, it’s worth giving it a shot.

Steve’s Rating: 5/5 stars.