Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

One of the most important things for a PPC affiliate is to track keyword performance.  You need to know which ads are getting you the sales and which are simply costing you money and not performing.  By cutting the non performing keywords you can increase your profit margins.

I’ve been tracking sales with unique sub ids in the destination url with are passed into the affiliate link and then generally track the cost of adgroups in Adwords against the sales they produce in Excel.  As least I’m not pissing in the dark but it does mean quite a bit of admin.  Anyway I’ve recently came across Tracking 202 Pro (no its not an affiliate link) which I hope if they integrate the networks I operate on it will replace my Excel spreadsheets, save on the admin time and maybe give me even a greater insight and let me track at the keyword level rather than the adgroup level (or when I’m lazy the campaign level).

Anyway I’ve signed up so I’ll let you know how it goes…..

No doubt Google are miles ahead of their main search competitor’s Yahoo and MSN.  I think the latest release from MSN of Bing.com just shows how desperate MSN are becoming to close the gap between Google.  I can’t see any search engine currently rivaling Google.  Looking at Bing.com the results seem the same and it simply seems a rebranding exercise by MSN.  Surely they can come up with something better than this.

I would love another search engine to come along and get a significant share of the market.  The joys of SEO’ing for 2 search engines but can’t see this happening anytime soon.  Boooo….

Been wondering recently the best way to link to sites that I am a affiliate for - I want to mask my affiliate links.  For Wordpress Al Carlton pointed me towards his Automatic Affiliate Links plugin which is great as you do not have to put your affiliate link into the blog post but put the normal product url and they are automatically made into affiliate links.  Great stuff.

However what if I’m not using Wordpress?  There are also meta refresh redirects but keep hearing Google doesn’t like these so not used these so far but seem a nice script on Hayley Quince’s blog so I’ll give that a try.

I think most SEOs will admit that link building is one of the hardest aspects of the job. Basically get some good links and you should be on your way to getting good rankings. Depending on the market it may take a lot more and a lot of other things come into play like age of site etc…

Anyway as I work on quite a few sites in competitive markets I would love to outsource the link building side of SEO. I’ve recently had a few chats with Indian link building companies and the guys I’ve spoken to I would not touch with a barge pole - basically too many spammy links too quickly. It is a quick route to a Google penalty. One of them wanted paying $3.50 per link and suggested I started with 50 links!! That is probably 50 spammy links which would raise a flag on the site and may trip an automatic penalty.

I know that I need to keep the quality side of link building up and it does take a long time to get those valuable links but there must be a better way to outsource this than to Indian companies who use methods that would have worked well 5 years ago but nowadays will knock your site out of the SERPs.

With UK agencies generally charging between £75 - £125 per hour, freelance SEOs charging about £35 p/hour there must be a market for knowledgable Indian SEO companies to charge about £10 p/hour and produce some really good results. I also don’t want to pay per link as then they get too many links.

Anyway, does anyone outsource their off-page optimisation to India and get good results? Maybe 30 backlinks a month from a variety of sources (some articles, in content links, forums, no follows, authoritive links) with varying anchor text would be great.  Maybe worth taking someone on in India and training them up via Skype?

After the success A4U Expo London last year, I decided to make the trip to Amsterdam and wasn’t dissapointed.

Once again the conference was expertly organised and the sessions I attended were both entertaining and informative. The conference was held at RAI in Amsterdam which was an excellent venue.

My favourite session was by Al Carlton on blogging strategies which was great and goes to show the value of fresh content and what can be done by regularly updating a blog. Top session.

I was also very impressed by Sri Sharma and how his company operates in over 20 different countries - his session on PPC was very interesting and I will be implementing some of his tips into my PPC campaigns which will probably be worth the whole conference fee.

The last session by Gary Beal from Vanguard SEO touched on some new strategies to make rapid SEO progress and in other regions and languages.  It is sessions like these that are worth going to A4U.

Finally Amsterdam was a great venue and I look forward to returning.  The city has some great bars, restaurants and nightlife.  The Ledisplein is a top quality place for a booze up :).

Not blogged for a while therefore thought it was neccessary to do a quick update on some of the changes in Google in the last month or so.

Those of you searching for specific long tail phrases in Google may have seen the search results now show 3 or 4 lines (above) of text instead of the usual 2 lines.  This is to give the user more idea of the contents of the site before clicking through.  My advice is to optimise those meta descriptions to include calls to actionto increase CTR (click through rate) on your site.

I see local search has now been integrated into the main Google search (previously only appeared if a Geographical phrase was used e.g. Liverpool).  Getting listed in Google Local Business Search is now essential for those businesses targeting customers locally.  However those sites which have worked hard to get top ranking for certain terms can now see themselves behind the Local Search Listing.  Frustrating!

Finally, I’m looking forward to A4U next week in Amsterdam.  Should be a good laugh

I went to A4U Expo @ London last year and thought it was great so when they announced they were holding an event in Amsterdam I decided to sign up.   Little over a month away now and been looking at some of the sessions and they look great.  Brief plan of what I’m planning to attend:

Day 1

09:30 - I went to the ‘SEO 101′ session in London last year and flet like leaving after 10 minutes so I’ll give this a miss this year and attend the conversion session by Tom Wesseling.

11:00 - The session at A4U London by Wordpress SEO expert Joost de Valk was great and I could do with a refresh so will be attending this one.

12:30 - The extreme SEO panel is always a good laugh with loads of slagging off at the spammers at Money Expert.

14:00 - Conversions is something I’m really interested in at the moment so I’ll be attending the conversion session by Mark Simpson.

15:00 - As an SEO at heart I’ll probably be going to the SEO session by Dave Naylor.  He is entertaining to listen to and gives away quite a bit of info which is always good.

16:30 - Final session of the day will be the International Super Affiliate Panel.

I’ll have a look at day 2 in the next few days.

Been working on a few Wordpress sites recently with has a generic Wordpress template and one of the sites had those pesky footer links which are encrpted and supposedly therefore can’t be deleted.  As an SEO I really want to rid of those footer links as could get the site banned from Google by linking out to unrelated sites.  After a bit of searching came across this guide with a few simple steps to get rid of those Wordpress footer links.  Sorted.

Bit late on the Twitter scene but my thought towards it has always been that Facebook does a good job already at status updates.  However I think it maybe a good tool to build a few relationships with other SEOs and others in the internet marketing space.  Therefore I’ve taken the plunge and signed up and we’ll see how it goes…..

With Chester City FC being my local team I usually drop by their website to see the latest news and have a laugh.  They are a poorly run football club and with gates around 1,500 are going nowhere fast.  Looks like their official website may have a Google penalty - it is in the index with a page rank of 6 - but it is not the top 100 resultrs for the term ‘chester city fc’.  I’ll have a bet the other 91 football league clubs websites appear 1st for their brand term.  Just another example of cock up Terry Smith style by Chester.  Think you need some SEO guys.