SpeedPPC Review - PPC Management Software

November 29, 2007 – 11:04 am

SpeedPPC is a desktop application that helps manage PPC campaigns for Google adwords and MSN Adcenter. I was very excited when I first learned about the software and what it claimed it could do; however after using it for a few weeks I have mixed feelings.

Creating Comprehensive Longtail Keyword Lists

This software basically lets you create hundreds of keyword combinations based on combining keyword lists. As a simple example look at the following:

Seed List -> Web, Website, Internet, Online
Expansion List -> Design, Marketing
Final List -> Web Design, Web Marketing, Website Design, Website Marketing, Internet Design, Internet Marketing, Online Design, Online Marketing

There is an immense possibility for what you can do with this portion of the software, but it does has limitations. In this simple example above you have a few keyword phrases that don’t really mesh well together such as ‘internet design, online design’; so you have to be careful in which words you select as you can’t exclude specific terms from the output. Once you have finalized your list you hit a button and it generates the text to copy and paste into your Google Adwords editor to upload to your campaigns.

Custom PPC Ads

The next useful part of the software is the ability to create custom text ads. This is in the Google Adwords format, notice the customizable options such as {seed}, {final}, etc. as keywords which I will explain below. Here is an example:

{Seed} Services!
If you are looking for {final} then you came to the right place.
www.webdesign.org
www.webdesign.org/index.php?seed={seed}expansion={expansion}final={final}

With the above example when you generate the ad for a specific keyword phrase, we’ll use ‘website design’ for example, it will fill in the blanks if you look at the seed, expansion, and final keyword combinations in the first part of the post. So for the example of ‘website design’ it would generate this:

Website Services!
If you are looking for website design then you came to the right place.
www.webdesign.org
www.webdesign.org/index.php?seed=”website”expansion=”design”final=”website design”

Custom PPC Landing Pages

The last part is the url and landing page. You notice it is a dynamic landing page and with some simple php scripts you can insert the seed, expansion, or final keword phrases on the landing page which changed dynamically based on what the user searched for to find you. So you could have the heading change depending on the final search phrase. So if they search for ‘website design’ that will be the heading on the page, if they search for ‘online marketing’ that will be the heading on the page, etc.

SpeedPPC Pros

This software is awesome for creating very specific and dynamic campaigns in Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter. It does an excellent job of setting up custom landing pages for your campaigns without a ton of effort.

SpeedPPC Cons

This software is not for someone who does not know at least basic HTML or have a technical background. It does take a while to get the idea of what the software can do and use it effectively. It has limitations on the keyword phrases you can use because of creating some undesirable combinations such as in our above example of ‘online design’. If you do have to make some changes you have to delete everything and re-upload the entire PPC campaign which I do not necessarily like.

It costs about $500 bucks, overall it was worth it but I could see someone else making a similar product to the next level which would be awesome.

Popularity: 27% [?]

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Sample SEO Analysis

November 25, 2007 – 8:44 pm

I was going through some old documents and came across this SEO analysis I did for a company almost 3 years ago. Its interesting as I still provide seo analysis similar to these in many ways but also different in many ways. They never proceeded forward with an SEO campaign and I just checked their website which still does not appear to have good rankings, although much better than when I checked them out 3 years ago. Check it out if you are interested to see an actual one I wrote up several years ago:

Initial SEO Suggestions
http://www.ski-west.com
Prepared by: Eric Morgan

Here is a breakdown of the different phases of internet marketing I would suggest. They are not in any particular order and the difficulty of implementation varies. These are just some initial suggestions after a quick glance at your website. I hope they will prove useful in your internet marketing efforts.
Note: this document is written for users who have some experience with HTML, if you would like a more detailed plan feel free to request one.

• Keyword Analysis: Perform a keyword analysis, identifying the words that your potential customers use when searching for ski packages. I would rate keywords in relevancy, number of searches, narrowness (is it specific or general?), and target market. This is one of the most important steps leading to a successful search engine optimization campaign and is too detailed to go over in this document; if you want further information on this I would be happy to provide it to you.

• Meta Tags: None of your pages have meta data, this is extremely important to include. I would suggest making the meta data unique to each individual page with a direct correlation to text found on the page as well as the targeted keywords. The meta title is the most important meta tag and should be used carefully. Below is a listing of actually words found on the main page, I would suggest making targeted keywords appear in the text as these words do:

Total words : 9
Word Count Density
colorado 7 8.75 %
snow 5 6.25 %
resort 5 6.25 %
shore 4 5.00 %
west 4 5.00 %
park 4 5.00 %
city 3 3.75 %
resorts 3 3.75 %
valley 3 3.75 %

• Content Improvement: “Content is King”, this is almost always true. The best method of building a successful internet marketing campaign is to fill the website with useful information that people are seeking for.

• Directory Submissions: ski-west.com does not appear in the DMOZ directory, this directory is the most important to maintain a listing in to have a successful marketing campaign, plus it is free. Another useful directory to consider is yahoo.com, but it costs slightly more.

• Inbound Links: I suggest that you spend a considerable amount of time getting other sites to link to your site. This can be done via directory submissions, link exchanges, publishing useful information on your website, service review, press releases, competition analysis, etc. Your website does not have very many incoming links as of now. If your incoming links improves this could greatly improve your search engine ranking positions as well as attract website visitors directly from the links.

Search Engine Incoming Links Found
Google 1
Yahoo! 19
AltaVista 19
Lycos/MSN 11
All The Web 18
Average 13.6

• Graphics/CSS/Scripts: I would suggest minimizing the use of graphics and scripting languages. Where it is possible I would replace graphics with html text and css to maintain the same look and feel of the website, this will help search engines find more information about your website. HTML is preferred over scripting languages when there is no need for the scripting language.

• Sitemap: Yahoo only has 1 page indexed. Although Google listed 7 pages within ski-west.com, none had descriptions because the search engines are not picking up any text. More pages need to be indexed by the search engines, the best way to do this is make a sitemap page that links all pages in one place and get rid of graphics/scripting languages.

• Conduct an industry and competitor analysis: In order to create an effective marketing campaign you should thoroughly understand your competitors, customers, and industry. Analyze competitor websites, market share, comparable products, customer behaviors, supply-demand, etc. If you understand what your clients need and the position of the competition you can take full advantage of the internet.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Permanent One Way Linking Service Review

September 27, 2007 – 12:01 pm

Here is a review from a company I tried out to get some one way permanent links. Their website promised ‘high quality’ links and the results were almost negative, links from very spammy websites. I guess you get what you pay for, but at least I know now it is not a good option to use.

The website is http://www.linking-service.com/. I ordered just 20 links to test their service. The website I was getting links for was focused around web design services.

This service promises “…When you buy links from us, you are getting quality; this is more than most services can say. If your website is important to you, rely on the quality one way links and permanent links that we offer.” Well that is pretty much blashemy on their part. The link quality was absolutely horrible; most on pages that had not relation at all to web design.

Keep in mind the website I was getting links for was a ‘web design’ business. Some of the websites they obtained links on were related to oil careers, anti-aging products, printing, die casting, and more unspeakable unrelated industries. I could not find one website that was really relevant to our industry.

They also promise “All of our text links come from different website markets from relevant pages that have less than 50 outgoing links. While this may not sound important to you, when it comes to search engine results this is beneficial. It goes along with the high quality that we offer every customer.” Yet many of the pages where we had obtained links from had hundreds or more of outgoing links, not less than 50. They also were not ‘relevant’ websites in contradiction to their website text.

Bottom line, don’t try this service out, its a total waste of money. I didn’t expect much from them considering the cost, but it was worth a shot! Too bad it was ‘too good to be true’.

Here is a sample list of websites they obtained links on:
http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/Our-Partners___147,,,Categories-14.html
http://www.webmaster-link-exchange.com/sublistings-cat-7-page-1.html
http://home.nestor.minsk.by/build/links/interiordesign.html
http://www.printfellas.com/links/Graphic_Design.html
http://www.oilcareer.com/lma/directory.php/Other_Amazing_Sites/Other_Amazing_Sites.html
http://www.geld-links.de/sub_29_1
http://beyondthesidewalks.com/directory/books.html
http://www.kineticdiecasting.com/resources/browse.php?id=19
http://www.anti-aging-revolution.net/p/Resources___155,,,Categories-24.html

If there are any services out there you were thinking about trying let me know and I may try them out and post a public review on it.

Popularity: 18% [?]

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PPC Management Software

September 24, 2007 – 3:05 pm

Today was a very busy day, as Mondays usually are. I spent some time reviewing and searching for some PPC management software tools. I found a few good ones but nothing really stood out to me except for one in particular called Speed PPC. There are several others who have ranted and raved about it; and if it really can save me 50-70% of my ppc management time it would be well worth the money, around $500. I am hoping to get my employer to approve it so I can try it out and see how well it works; but I don’t have much more information than that.

I also spent a lot of time working on SEO and PPC proposals for potential clients for my work, Twelve Horses. We sure have been very busy lately with lots going on, which is a good thing. There are so many directions I want to take with getting things going at Twelve Horses that sometimes its hard to prioritize what is most important to focus on first, but I have been making some tremendous progress.

I did some research on some good SEO related plugins for wordpress as well and found some good ones, but that will have to be a post for another day.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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Utah Tech Spotlight

September 20, 2007 – 5:16 pm

Today a bulk of my day was spent at the Utah Tech Spotlight. They featured UNSPAM, a Utah based company that is a non-profit organization that is combating spam among other things. It was an interesting topic but the networking was even better. I met up with Jordan and Jacob from wiworks, they are also in the SEO industry; I have read Jordan’s blog on occassion so it was very good to meet him in person. I also met Sheri from Myriad Genetics, she is their webmaster. And Jacob from Wordpress.

It was good meeting some new faces in Utah, talking about SEO and learning about email spam and what some organizations are doing to try to prevent it. I also was able to have a long conference call with several from my company to work out some pricing on offering clients PPC landing pages so we don’t have to get a custom quote every time. This will make it much easier to tell a potential client how much it will costs to get some customized landing pages up for their PPC campaign; which I must say is invaluable and I hate to manage PPC campaigns that do not have landing pages involved in the equation. The conversion is SO much better when you have custom landing pages with information that the searcher is looking for.

I also started my first posts on this new blog. I doubt anyone is reading this yet, but my goal is to start having 20 or so visits within one month from now. Hopefully I can accomplish this. Since I was in the process of setting up this blog I also was looking into some good plugins for SEO purposes and found some good ones but didn’t have the time to integrate them yet. That will most likely be another post maybe early next week.

All in all it was a very busy day; glad its over so I can relax for a while. At least tomorrow is Friday :)

Popularity: 13% [?]

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