During out trials over the last week, I came across a little nugget of information I considered useful, and maybe you will as well.  I was under the impression that Google’s keyword recommendations for my campaign as well as the quality score were a reflection of the website I was sending my traffic to.  After some experimentation, I found that is not exactly the case.  Google’s keyword recommendations and an important part of the quality score comes from the keywords and terminology used in your advertisements.

I kept wondering why google would recommend keyterms for my landing page, and then turn right around and tell me that the quality score for that term was poor on my site.  This was basically Google’s way of telling me I needed to rewrite my ads, because they didn’t think my ads related to my site.

So, for our campaigns at least, the trick to a good google quality score is in the advertisement text.

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We pushed craigslist ads for thier products to the top of the google rankings, and increased their traffic and exposure.

Unfortunately, none of this has turned into increased phone activities or increased sales.  The market they are in is drying up due to the current economic situation, and our efforts have not stopped that trend.

We will continue to work on it, and I’ll update you on our efforts.

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Unfortunately, I have been unable to login to this site since I made the swap and my time has been limited so I have been unable to find the problem.  Over the weekend, I finally sat down and researched the issue.

My research found that mod bandwidth is breaking php5 and that when it is enabled, the _POST variable is not being filled and thus no form submissions work.  A quick recompile of apache and php5 without mod bandwidth fixed this issue.

So, I guess most of this week will be spend moving websites.

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If this continues in our future tests, then we  only need to repost this ad every 4 days.

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So, I created 24 ads and decided to post one ad in each of the “big locations” that is linked directly off the Craigslist home page.  I chose these markets because they should have the most link juice because they are the fewest clicks from the home page and thus should show up higher in the Google SERPs and also be picked up quicker.

My client sells many variations of the same product.  The variation is significant and makes it a distinctly different product.  So, I made 24 variations of the same ad that just changed some text to note this variation.  My first ad was posted fine.  However, every ad after that one is tagged as a duplicate.

When creating my ads, I wanted the variations so that the name of the actual variant of this product would show in the title.  This helps the Google results.  To overcome the duplicate error, I am going to post one ad for this product and list each duplicate in the body.  I don’t know if we will rank as highly in Google, but it’s worth a try.

So, I am going to create 24 ads for different products and post one in each market.  Spreading them out among different markets will hopefully keep us from getting flagged as spam like 24 posts in the same market would.

I’ll update you later on the results.

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His question to me was to see if I could do something online to bring in more sales.  He has a tremendous sales team, I just need to get the phone ringing.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t have much if anything to spend on advertising as his business isn’t doing well, so methods like PPC will be limited initially.

Keep an eye on this blog over the next week as we fill you in on our methods, what is working, and how much of an impact we are able to make with his brick and mortar business in a short time span.

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I agree, SEO is dying. It isn’t quite dead yet, but is heading toward extinction as Google continues to grow and incorporate more human generated information into it’s algorithm. However, SEOs will continue to thrive as they move away from tricking the algorithms and more toward practicing UEO (User Experience Optimization) which good SEOs are already doing.

Typically, the phrase SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used to describe tweaking your website to take advantage of known deficiencies in search engine algorithms in order to increase your rankings for particular key terms. SEO, if done properly, works. However, many of the known search engine algorithm deficiencies are constantly being improved and modified so that many SEO tweaks only have a short term effect. I understand that the term SEO has grown to often encompass more than this, but if you poll around, you’ll see that this is most people’s understanding of the term.

It is the mission of search engine companies to provide users with the best search experience possible by feeding them the information they desire. The search engines attempt to cater completely to the user and their needs. With SEO, we have created a struggle between the search engines and website owners in which we fight to “fool” the engines in falsely ranking our sites.

What we should be focusing on is UEO (User Experience Optimization) and making sure we optimize our website to provide our users with the information they desire in a format that is easy for them to browse. With UEO, website owners work more in harmony with search engines as we both share the same goal of quality content that is easily accessible.

When performing UEO on your website, don’t worry about the search engine rankings. If you build quality sites that are user friendly, search engine love will follow. Considering UEO when developing your sites will lead to much longer, more sustainable search engine ranking results.

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The concept is simple, but don’t underestimate the power of it.  The basic premise is that whatever thought dominates your brain most of the time is a goal that you will eventually accomplish.  How long it takes to accomplish depends on your resources and the goal, but it will eventually happen.

The idea is that whatever your dominant though is, you will regularly take steps toward it and thus setting yourself up to achieve the goal.

Do you want to save money?  Make this your dominant thought and you will be more frugal in your daily life.  Want to lose weight?  Make this your dominant thought and every time you pick up a menu this will be on your mind.

When I set making money as my dominant thought, I quickly see a rise in profit and income.  However, when my dominant thought fades more toward restoring my 1963 Impala, I see my income level decrease.

The trick is to find a long term goal, and work to make that your dominant thought until the goal is accomplished.  Switching between goals often conflicts and hampers your progress toward completing them.

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In all fairness, this doesn’t include AOL for some reason.  However, when targetting search engines, you must keep in mind that google gets twice as many searches as the other top 3 combined. 

This data just strengthens my opinion that you should target Google and spend all of your time on it, and just fall where you may in the other engines until your Google rankings are in line and you have time to work on the other engines. 

According to the latest Hitwise ratings, here is how the following top search engines rank:

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If you are interested in learning more about blog promotion, be sure to check out and follow the Cow vs Conn contest page.

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