It’s time to target more long tail keywords for your online business.

Are you tapping on the content network found in Google Adwords? If not, you are probably missing out on quite a fair amount of high quality traffic. While it’s true the visitors are not as targeted as the ones from their search platform, in the past, these days I am seeing an improvement in how the ads are displaying.

Just yesterday, while researching on a particular niche with quite a number of tabs opened on my browser, I went on to a another site which has absolutely no mention of the keywords related to that niche on the site. If I can recall correctly, Google did make an acquisition for a company which has developed a technology to deliver relevant ads based on the history of the visitors’ trace of prior visits.

I think this is very significant and while I may be late into this but this is a quite a discovery for me. Privacy issues aside, advertisers on Adwords platform can be assured of high quality traffic even on the Content and Placement network. As always, it’s time to test further. And I still have some adwords credits to give away, it’s worth SG$150.

This is is actually quite a funny presentation by Matt on Google’s performance in SEO terms. I am sure you will learn a thing or two, but crack you up as well!

As a member of the Google Advertising Professionals program, I am eligible to receive AdWords promotional coupons. These vouchers are completely free and you can use them start on AdWords with a
risk-free trial. Coupon expires July 31st, 2010. Let me know. Strictly meant for 1st timer.

Someone showed this professional seo proposal they got from a Singapore IT company, and asked me what for my thoughts. In less than 2 seconds, I told them to stay away! This is literally so last decade. Take me back to the early part of 2000 and I think it probably will work, in fact it will work damn well. Fast forward to 2010, this is totally obsolete, and dangerous. Not only will it not work, it just cast your site to the pits of hell literally.

Let’s break it down…When there are only a handful of key search engines globally, and with spiders crawling around, why you do need 15k times of search engine site submission.

Spinning 15 articles and distributing to 35,000 blogs sounds alright on paper, but it’s probably not going to happen. Nothing wrong with article spinning, just make sure it’s spinning to good quality content.

5,000 directories submission? I can show you a list of top ranking sites that can’t be found in more than half the list of directories they have. Anyway, enough said, I seriously can’t differentiate between package 1 and 2.

Only uninformed small business owners will be easily attracted by such offers, afterall, what’s a 4-figure sum compared to a number 1 ranking on Google! But dont get me wrong, I am sure it will still work on certain sites, and only time will tell if these sites will survive the next round of algorithm change.

I attended the half day 2nd Google Analytics Master Class held in Singapore a couple of weeks back, it was a full house event held at Meritus Mandarin Singapore. Session started late but went on really well with a few good case studies shared by some vendors, analytics staff from Google and mostly hotels usage of Google Analytics.

If you are a beginner, my sense is you will be lost, but if you have installed Google Analytics on your site, I am pretty sure this session did bring about some fresh insights, it did for me. Unless you are one of those Google Analytics Certified Partners, you are probably under utilizing Analytics to help you improve further on your business results.

In fact, after this “class” I was even more motivated to go get my Google Analytics Individual Qualification, after all why waste the US$50 credit they gave us for free to participants. I strongly encourage you to attend the next session. I think the crowd was at 400-500, I am pretty sure it will swell further at the next class.

I think what I really like about this particular class is when each speaker list down actionable steps you can take to conclude on their presentation. On most seminars I have attended, the speakers did nothing but make them feel better and left you wondering what’s next?

Truth be told, since the launch of Google Analytics back in 2005, plenty has changed, improvements were made, and you really can’t manage what you can’t measure or track. It’s vital for one track everything as the landscape of search marketing gets more and more competitive by the day.

I have signed up for the free Internet Show organized by Terrapinn, a pretty well-known conference organiser in this region. It’s a good platform to learn new things and get sold to. Let’s face it, there is always a catch with such free events. Your contact details will get distributed to all the different vendors especially the sponsors of such events.

Personally, it’s just a great place to meet new people in the industry and for networking purposes. So let me know if you will be there!

For more information about the Singapore Internet Show, click here.

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Google Super Bowl Commercial from Jerry West on Vimeo.

I came across this at one of the marketing sites, enjoy while it last! Use this $50 to take Google Adwords for a spin, testing is part and parcel of finding a successful campaign. It’s all about finding the right converting keywords to help you decided where you can spend more on.

While the Google Adwords is an excellent platform to test drive your campaign, but the way it has been set up, you can literally lose your shirt if you are new to this, so do take up on this free advertising $50 offer here to test it out.

Lately I have come across quite a number of sites that are ranking relatively high on Google even though their sites are not so great to warrant a top 10 spot. So the Google’s algorithm is not perfect afterall, it never was and it will probably take a while for them to get there.

Well upon further investigation, I have come to realize getting top rankings as of now is still about getting links, not just good links but quality links pointing to your site with the desired anchor text. But let me quality myself further, if your competition is not optimizing links to their site, then you’ve got a pretty high chance of beating them simply getting just a few links to point to your site, heck, it doesn’t even need to be relevant links. Some links are better than no links and non-relevant links are better than no links, period.

Only God knows what the next Google update will bring as they tighten their system. So you are left with 2 choices? Start manually building links right now, or start attracting links and there is a vast difference. Building links take more work and unless your effort can be multiplied, you will realized competition will only get stiffer and search engines will get smarter.

Attracting links is about work too but the chances of you building an auto-building link campaign is so much higher if you can begin to offer good and sound content to your potential customers. I would the chances of a good content piece getting passed on is so much higher than your manual link building efforts, afterall, the links won’t multiply themselves but a good content will.

Ok, having said all this, it’s still important to build links at least initially. Over-time, the smart thing to do is to let links grow through good content.