Google Adwords introduces ‘Broad Match Modifier’ in Canada and the UK

In Google Adwords, broad match phrases can lead to your ads showing up for some very irrelevant queries. For instance, if your broad match phrase is ‘pink shoes’, your ad can show up for a wild assortment of queries like ‘ pink clown shoes’, ‘pink ballet shoes’, ‘pink scuba shoes’. While if you use phrase match, your ads may not get enough visibility for ‘pink shoes’. So Google has introduced ‘Broad Match Modifier’ to remedy this issue.

How it works

Today we’re introducing the broad match modifier, a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign …

Set a preferred domain for search

So what is a preferred domain? The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results. By not setting a preferred domain, your www. and non-www version of the web site may be seen as duplicate content. And this would be bad!

If for some reason you cannot find your web site in Google when you type in www.example.com. Try example.com instead. Google may see the non-www version as the preferred domain.

So how can you set a preferred domain? You can set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is usually the first thing we check …

Googles dislike for duplicate content

There is nothing that search engines hate more than duplicate content. Google and the other search engines have very stringent criteria for detecting duplicate content.

Here is Google’s definition of Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a …

Google MayDay – drop in rankings for long-tail phrases

There has been some interesting discussion regarding a possible update from Google which folks have dubbed “MayDay”. Webmasters and search marketers are reporting that they are experiencing large drops in long-tail search traffic especially for large web sites for well established brand that you would think have incorporated clean SEO tactics.

Reports from SEO Roundtable (www.seoroundtable.com) suggest that:

Most of these complaints come over webmasters seeing a huge drop in traffic from Google over “long tail keywords.” Keyword phrases that are 3 or more keywords long. One person said he had a “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000′s of long tail k/w.” Another person “recovered until this Mid April, when it started seeing some recovery, then bang now 90% of its traffic, mostly long tail disappeared.” Then we get the “me toos,” “that’s exactly what has happened to my site. 50% loss of traffic and constant hammering by …

Find out how users are searching for your business online

We all know that people are using search engines more and more to find businesses like yours. But how do we find out what kind of keywords are used more often in a specific area?

Fortunately Google makes this data available for all of us, it provides details as to how many people are searching for specific products or services and what kind of keywords they are using on these searches.

On the video below we show you how to use this data to improve your website:

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