If not, you should be!

Don’t forget Google AdWords offers the ability to try out different ads to see which one gives the best results.

Within an Ad Group, simply click on Create New Text Ad or Image Ad. When multiple Ads are running, Google will automatically deliver whichever Ad has the best click through rate, and will tell you what that click through rate is.

Multiple Google Ads are a marvellous way of finding out which particular feature or benefit is most important to your visitors. So if you were promoting fountain pens, you could try out headlines such as:

Discounted Fountain Pens

and

Cheap Fountain Pens

with the same description. Not only will it tell you which is the better wording for your AdWords campaign it will also provide invaluable insight into which keyword phrase to use for your organic SEO campaign.

At the recent SES conference in London, the Google representative advised always having three Ads running at a time, regularly dropping the worst performing one and replacing it with a new Ad so that your campaign is continually being improved – it’s just too easy to let a campaign sit there looking after itself, especially if the click through is quite good.

Must make note to do as I preach ;-)

By the way, do you just rely on Google's Reports to let you know how many visitors they delivered to your site? Did you know that there's likely be a significant percentage difference between the number of visitors that Google sent to the number that actually arrived. Find out more about this and other important aspects of using ClickTracks web analytics software to establish precisely what is happening with your web site and your all important visitors.

Find out more about the ClickTracks training event on 20th July @

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/click.htm

For those of you who are unaware, the subject of cloaking has been a controversial one in the world of SEO and SEM for some time. Cloaking is essentially the technique of returning different pages according to who or what is requesting them. E.g. a search engine would be presented with a different page to that of a surfer unbeknowingly.

The purpose of cloaking for search engine optimisation can be for several reasons: to hide highly optimised pages from people so that they can't be lifted, or to provide search engine spiders with highly optimised pages that are lacking in visible content for search engines such as those sites constructed in Flash.

So, is it ethical, or could the practice get you banned? Depending on your views might determine whether you label it as 'cloaking' or 'IP delivery' meaning essentially the same thing except that when the search engines use it they call it 'IP delivery, of course!

The point is that the search engines do it all the time and there was some hilarity at the recent SES conference in London when it was related that Google banned itself inadvertently for precisely using this method! An example of when a search engine uses IP Delivery is when it chooses to determine which country you're in and serves you www.google.co.uk even when you've keyed in www.google.com into the browser. Or even when it displays AdWords targeted towards your country as opposed to another.

Certainly, at the SES Conference in Islington the week before last, there seemed to be much more tranparency and honesty surrounding the use of cloaking. Many top SEO companies openly admitted using it for what they considered to be extremely valid purposes.

So what did Google have to say on the issue? Magnus Sandberg, Software Engineer for Google stated: "As long as the purpose is benevolent, I would not call it cloaking"

I guess the message is 'be careful' in how you use it and your purpose for doing so, and, make sure you use a reputable company that carefully monitors IP addresses so that you don't make a hash of it.

Are you measuring your visitors' online behaviour when they visit your web site and do you really know which campaigns are providing a return on investment? If not, you might just as well hand over your open cheque book to ppc providers. Come along to our ClickTracks training event on 20th July and learn how one company was able to save in the region of £44,000 per year with no downturn in enquiries and sales:

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/click.htm

As ever, there were some interesting debates at last week’s Search Engine Strategies Conference at the Business Design Centre, Islington with regard to both the Google Sandbox (does it exist or not?) and that old favourite chestnut, the name that dare not be mentioned – ahem, cloaking, that is.

For those of you that are unaware, there is a theory that Google places newly launched sites into a sandbox on which it firmly places the lid 6-9 months or longer so that you might see your site rank initially for a few days only for it to disappear into the sandbox without trace, other than making an appearance for very tertiary keyword phrases. Mike Grehan of http://www.search-engine-book.co.uk/ fame was unsure as to its existence or not and used the analogy of a new book on a bookshelf that no-one is aware of. As time goes by, the book becomes publicised, increases in popularity and therefore gets selected from the bookshelf on a more frequent basis. Likewise a web site needs visitors clicking on it from unique IP addresses in order to help it climb up the rankings quicker. I think that was the gist of it!

Barry Lloyd of MakeMeTop (http://www.makemetop.co.uk) was more convinced of its existence while Danny Sullivan of http://searchenginewatch.com/ felt that a lot of SEO Consultants use it as an excuse for other failings so the debate continues. It was certainly felt that Google is more inclined to pick up new content on an old domain rather than new content on a new domain and that the age of a domain carries a large degree of authority with it. It was suggested that Google does query registrant information pertaining to domain names such as who owns it and for how long.

So what did Google themselves have to say on the subject? Well, the response from Magnus Sandberg, a Google Software Engineer, when queried about whether the sandbox existed or not was: ‘Google has to feel comfortable about a new site prior to ranking it’. Make of that what you will!

With regard to, ahem, cloaking, we’ll cover that in next week’s snippet.

Meantime, don’t forget that the next training event on ClickTracks, the award winning web analytics software, is on 20th July at the Novotel, Hammersmith. You’ll find more information @ http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/click.htm. Follow the link at the bottom of the page for registration information.