Relevant and targeted keywords are crucial for a PPC campaign. Equally important are negative keywords (or negatives as they are commonly called). Negatives are word filters that disqualify text ads from triggering for specific search queries.

For instance if you are a iPhone reseller and “iPhone” is one of your keywords, each time somebody does a search for that keyword your ad will be displayed- this is a good thing. What is probably not good is if your ads also showed up for a search on “iPhone problems”. To avoid this and bloating total impressions with irrelevant searches it’s important to add “Problem” as your negative keyword. This way “iPhone Problem(s)” search query would not trigger your text ads.

Every search engine advertiser should use negative keywords in their Pay Per Click (PPC) account. A comprehensive list of negatives helps ensure targeted visits to your site which will in turn significantly improve not only your CTR, but also your overall conversion rate.

Not using negative keywords can mean that your ads show to users who aren’t interested in your business or service. This untargeted traffic could lower your keywords Quality Score and negatively impact your return on investment.

How to find negative keywords idea:

• Google Keyword Tool: Place your keywords in the keyword tool. Google shows keywords related to your products or services. Check the Keyword column for any search query that is irrelevant to your business and that you wouldn’t want triggering your ads. Click the downward-pointing arrow in the Keyword column for each keyword that you want to be added as a negative. Select that keyword and it is added as a negative.

• Search Query Report: Pull a search query report at regular intervals to check what keywords trigger your ads. The new Google interface has a feature which is somewhat hidden, but it helps you run a search query report at the ad group level without actually running a full-blown report to find additional keywords or negative keywords.Here’s how you can access that- under the keywords tab, click the “see search terms” drop down and click “all” or “selected” (be sure a date range is chosen). You will see the actual search queries that displayed your ads. Search queries that are not relevant to your product/services can be added as a negative keywords right from this window.  Just click the box next to a particular keyword and click “Add as negative keyword“.

• Analytics: It can be an amazing source of negative keywords. Look at your organic data and not just your PPC data. If you are unsure of any terms, do a simple search for the keyword and see what results pop up.

• Use A Thesaurus: Run your main keywords through a Thesaurus. This not only helps in expanding your negatives but also helps with main keyword list.

• Industry Analysis: Use your product and industry knowledge and think of words that are similar or spelled similarly to your product or service names. Remember that there are products released every day, so set up Google Alert for your keywords.

Conclusion:
Once you’re done with adding negatives at your campaign or ad group level, check for account performance. Look for improvements in CTR, quality score and conversions. Here’s a list 150+ Negative Keywords for Software Selling AdWords Campaigns with examples  to add to your PPC groups.

Adding negatives is an ongoing process. Depending on your product you might need to look at new negatives every day.

Until recently, the sitelinks that you have most commonly seen have probably looked something like this:

The purpose of sitelinks is to help searchers navigate a specific page they are in need of as quickly as possible. However, earlier this week, Google announced its improved and expanded version of sitelinks. The newer version is arranged as a column of links and appears more prominently on the search engine results page.

The new sitelinks is certainly helping brands dominate the search results page. According to Google, displaying more sitelinks is designed to help users quickly navigate to the most relevant section of a site. But, let’s try and understand how the changes will affect websites, and how they can adapt and take advantage of them.

For starters, the new sitelinks takes up a large chunk of the first page results thus ruling out potential competitors and other less relevant sites sneaking above the fold. Online user behavior will change as more users will want to click on the pages listed in sitelinks than look for websites listed below in search results, thus helping brand conversions significantly. Also certain is the tangible increase in organic visits and sales from keywords containing brand permutations.

Adapting to this change is critical and website architecture is really important (directory structure, URL naming conventions etc…); also, make full use of Google’s webmaster console to manage sitelinks and take Google’s humanized results page and ranking factors into consideration.

ReadWriteWeb - Web technology blog

Bob Walsh’s new book, “The Web Startup Success Guide” has just been officially launched on Amazon. As promised in my previous post, here is another example of what you’ll find in his book after purchase. It’s a cool interview he made with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer at  ReadWriteWeb, who gives advice to tech startups on approaching him with newsworthy information. Hope you’ll find it useful as well, here’s the interview:

Bob: What’s the right way for startups to approach you who want you to write about them? What’s the wrong way?

After so much work you’ve done redesigning your website, adding all those cool features and getting rid of all annoying bugs, it would be a pity to ruin everything because you forget the small but essential details.

You cannot afford to lose page rank, valuable links or loyal visitors, in a word, you should not lose more than you win with the new version of the website.

If you’re reading this, I know that you are in a hurry, because deadline is probably pretty short ahead of you, so make sure you go through this checklist before the commit of the new website:

1. No broken links, no 404 errors

Let XENU be your best friend today. Download it, install it, just enter the URL of your site and let Xenu do his job (it’s free). Fix all the 404 errors, do as many 301 redirects as you need to, and then do the checking again and again, until Xenu says it’s ok :). Also, the mod rewrite should be made in a user friendly manner, so as to generate readable URLs. Just to make sure, don’t forget to create a user friendly customized 404 page.

Almost 2 weeks ago we got back from the 18th edition of the Software Industry Conference held this year in Boston, Massachusetts. I know it’s taken me a while to write this, but I can explain. It’s called jet lag plus hundreds of e-mails.

It was a busy and successful participation for us: 3 presentations, 1 hospitality suite where we met with the participants (some of them our clients and partners), exhibit night, nice parties, and networking with beer, chocolate and sea food (OK, I’ll admit it, this was my favorite).

I really enjoyed presenting, thanks to Paris Karahalios for inviting us on the (you can download the presentations): Social Networking Media panel (I got a lot of friends on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, so I think the presentation reached its goal), as well as the Effective Advertising & Marketing panel.