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Archive for November, 2009

5 Tips to Boost your Directory Submission Workflow with a Simple Google Account!

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Here’s the 1st blog post of series that will hopefully help you in your daily task of Directory Submissions and managing them VERY FAST!

As an SEO Manager, I’ve seen many SEO’s pretending to do fast and efficient Directory Submissions.

While many do an excellent job, some use automatic submission tools, resulting in significant drops in rankings.

Others like myself go the long way round and submit manually. This is a time consuming, so its all important to do in fastest way possible!

I think it would be relevant to share a few tips on how to submit to directories Fast AND in a 100% White Hat way.

Let’s start with something straighforward: managing your Link Building Campaign with a simple Google Account. I will give you 5 Tips that you can apply straight away & are meant to be a time saver for any Seo Manager who does directory submission on a daily basis on a regular.

Ready? Here we go!

1. Submitting easily with Google Toolbar Auto-fill

Autofill is an essential tool in any directory submission process. The one integrated in the Google Toolbar is pretty straighforward and will autofill any basic info like the company name, email address and  address.

Once you’ve installed the Google Toolbar, here’s what the auto-fill button looks like:  

The Google Toolbar has 2 important drawbacks though:

1. 1 set of data per Google account, that is per toolbar. In other words it’s impossible to manage several accounts/clients without logging out and logging in again.
2. the data auto-fillable is static: that means it doesn’t work with selections, checkboxes, radio buttons and any valid form fields and you cannot choose which field you would like to autofill.

To do all that, you will another tool, but that will be another post!

2. Creating Filters in Gmail to easily redirect each email to its appropriate folder

If you do dozens of directory submissions for dozens of clients, you easily end up after just a few months with thousand of emails to manage. Between confirmation emails,  emails related to articles that need to be edited because they don’t fit into the directory editorial guidelines & listings that need to be relisted as they have been rejected, we, as Seo Managers, needs to keep track of everything fast… and for that you have to have a reliable and friendly email client.

Here at Euston Digital, we’ve been using Gmail for years and we can easily say it’s by far the best email client. You can sign up for a free account here.

With the last months improvements, playing with filters has never been so much fun!

So what can you do with the filters?

First of all, to create filters with Gmail, click on the link as indicated on the picture.

3. Take Advantage of the Import/Export Filters Function & apply your settings to all your Google accounts

Once you’re happy with a set of filters, here’s where Gmail makes the difference: you can easily apply the same set of filters to all of your clients, that is all of your Gmail accouts!

Here’s how:

Step 1: enabling the Filter import/export function.

This is still a Gmail Labs function so you will have to go to lab (upper right of you screen, as pictured here: 

then do a Ctrl+F for the term “Filter import/export” and click on “enable”.

Step 2: Once that’s done, you will have 2 new buttons in your filter section, as shown below. The rest should be self explanatory, drop us a line if it’s not!

4. Articles Management made easy Using Google Docs

Nowadays, Article Directories is still considered as a relevant way of obtaining quality backlinks to any website. However, managing  articles for dozens of clients can be one of the most time consuming task in Link Building. To Help you be faster Google Docs is here! Many benefits from it, let’s expose 3 great functions here:

1. 1st Pro, no need to search each article on your computer or anywhere else anymore. Each article will now be at one click of a button! Indeed you can access Google Docs direcly from Gmail, upper right of the screen. There, all the articles related to the appropriate Google Account/Client will be listed and stored as long as needed.
2. Another great benefit from Google Docs: you can invite any of your clients to view the possible changes you’ve made. Once invited, they’ll be able to review the changes and edit them on the fly, without even signing in to any Google account! 
3. And last but not least, with the new Bulk Upload Function launched a few days ago, you can easily upload on Google Docs all the articles your clients are likely to send you in a Word format at once! Files can be uploaded to Google Docs either by enabling a right-click menu item or through drag-and-drop functionality… another great time saver!
   

5. Managing Multipe Gmail Accounts at one click of a button

A final tip useful when Deadlines have to be met and it’s just a hassle to switch from one account to another:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320

Once Installed, you  will quickly realize this is a fantastic Plugin for directory submissions! A simple right click at the bottom right of your browser will display the following pop up:

As you can see, it’s now easy to visualize which one of your client account has messages, and, even better, a simple click will direct you to any Google account of your choice. Everything’s working fast and smooth!

Conclusion

At Euston Digital, we all hope this blog post – my very first post actually! – will help you optimise your work flow while managing your link building campaigns. Feel free to drop any comments about what you think about this article as well as sharing some tools that could help SEO’s to be even faster and have more time to…. say… do more PPC?

Charly Wargnier

Tags: Directory Submissions, Link Building, SEO
Posted in Link Building, SEO, Search Engines | 10 Comments »

Google AdWords Sitelinks: Taking even more control of the Search Engine Results Page

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

On Tuesday this week Google released a new feature on their AdWords system called ‘Sitelinks’.

What are they?

Sitelinks are additional links that you can place into your AdWords creative that take visitors to other pages on your website. Whilst the headline continues to link through to the main destination page that you set at a keyword or creative level, Sitelinks send users to alternative pages that might also be relevant.

This is what it looks like:

Better user experience

The idea behind Sitelinks, as per usual with Google, is to create a better experience for the user. They have recognised that when searching for a company or a product, there are many alternative bits of information on your website that users might be looking for. By introducing Sitelinks they have made it easier for the user to navigate directly to the most relevant content.

It’s mostly about Brand searches

Google reckons that Sitelinks are going to be most relevant when it comes to brand searches. Whilst brand searches are a clear indication of the intended destination of the user, beyond that the user intention is a bit vague. Google knows that you want to find the website for company X, but it doesn’t know why. And it doesn’t know which page will be the most relevant. Sitelinks let users choose the most relevant page for them

Why this is good for AdWords advertisers

Better user experience is good for advertisers too!
To start with, there’s the reason above, Google’s stated intention. By introducing additional links into your advert you make the user work less, and take them directly to the right page on your website. The easier their life, the fewer clicks they’re forced to make, and the more likely they will be to become a customer of yours

Owning the Search Engine Results Page
As discussed previously, the search engine results page is an important piece of real estate for you to take ownership of. AdWords creatives that contain Sitelinks are twice the size of normal AdWords creative, and therefore use up twice the amount of space. As such they are much more likely to be read and clicked on by users. This pushes other results down the page and lets you own the users eye-time with your creative message.

Giving depth and colour to your service
It’s difficult to sum up your company in 95 characters, which is all you get in a normal AdWords creative. You have to make a judgment about the reason that people are searching for you, and hit them with a message that fits that. In reality, people will search for you for many different reasons. Some might want product A, other might want B. Some might want to read your blog and others of course will be looking for your contact details. By placing all these links in your AdWords creative you can showcase a lot more to the searcher before they even get to your website.

The Holy Grail
This is where I reckon that Sitelinks will transform a good campaign into a slamming campaign. Only certain campaigns are eligible for Sitelinks. These typically have the highest quality scores, and are often brand campaigns.

However, if you are able to add Sitelinks to a generic campaign, then something quite magical can happen. When users who are searching for a non-branded product or service see your Sitelinks enabled ad in position no.1, the chances that it will be clicked are significantly higher than a normal advert. This will drive Click Through Rate through the roof, and mean that you can afford to reduce your bids on that keyword. So you get more traffic for a lower cost. And you take ownership of the SERPs for a generic product. AdWords heaven!

You can add Sitelinks from the Settings page of your campaign, under ad extensions.

Tried Sitelinks? Share your experience below.

Tags: Google AdWords, Sitelinks
Posted in PPC | 9 Comments »