AdSense Text Ads Get Title Highlighting

Google announced that it has updated all text AdSense ads to allow for the title color of ads to be changed when the user moves their mouse over a link.

The company says after a period of testing, it found that this actually results in higher earnings for publishers, while also “increasing user and advertising value.”

“As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages,” says Stephen Yuan with Google’s AdSense engineering team. “After extensive testing, we have found that the color of the change itself can make a big difference: the wrong shade can even be detrimental to clickthrough rate (CTR). To determine the color that the title link will change to when a user places their mouse cursor over it, we’ll take your chosen title color and find a nearly complementary color on the color wheel. For example, a blue title would change to red. These colors outperformed all the others we tested.”

“We’ll continue to keep studying the effects of color on CTR and ad performance to bring you more enhancements in the future,” adds Yuan.

I’ll get right to the point. You can’t bolt a couple of pages onto the edge of your ecommece site like a sidecar to a motorcycle and call it search engine optimization. Or, rather, you can launch your SEO sidecar but it won’t achieve the organic search performance you desire without applying additional SEO strategies.

The Sidecar Effect

I hear this often: “I know I need more content, good content, on my site. So I hired a writer, did the keyword research, designed these new pages and linked to them from my sitemap, but I’m still not ranking. Why?”

I call this the SEO strategies: a section of content (the sidecar) that is topically relevant to the primary ecommerce site (the motorcycle) connected by a thin link rather than integrated into the core functionality of the machine (the ecommerce site).

The SEO sidecar, like many outdated SEO strategies, had some success several years ago. But Google’s Farmer-Panda update earlier this year killed these tactics. That’s the glory of focusing on the core principles of SEO — crawlability, relevance, high quality and unique content, and quality links for the content that needs to rank — rather than shortcuts.

Search engine optimization in its most basic form is about optimizing one page of content at one URL for one keyword phrase. There are lots of ways to scale SEO so that the process is more automated and streamlined, but at the end of the day the pages you actually want to rank — your motorcycle, not the sidecar — need to be the pages you optimize with valuable, relevant content.

Two Missing Elements

Now, let’s assume the SEO sidecar content itself is valuable to users and well written. Let’s assume that it’s not what marketers would refer to scornfully as “SEO content” with lots of obvious keyword repetition that adds no real user value. You could, of course, do a lot of external link building to your SEO sidecar, thereby increasing its link popularity and chance of ranking. But because it’s not integral to the site, the SEO sidecar typically lacks the following two critical SEO elements.

1. Internal Links. The SEO sidecar exists because marketers would rather not muck up their sleek ecommerce sites with SEO elements like optimized title tags, headings and a bit of descriptive content and cross links. I argue that, when designed well, SEO, branding and usability can and should coexist peacefully. But the SEO sidecar typically takes the easy way out and skimps on branding, design and user value in favor of emphasizing the SEO elements. The result is poor internal linking to the SEO sidecar content, because no one in the company really wants users to actually see the SEO sidecar.

   Unfortunately, poor internal linking means that the SEO sidecar not only has to work hard for external links, it typically has to subsist on just one link from its own ecommerce site. Search engines take this lack of internal linking to the SEO sidecar as a big vote of no confidence in the content. If the site itself isn’t confident in the SEO sidecar, then why on earth should the search engines trust it enough to rank it well? And because it has no link popularity to begin with, it has none to share back into the primary ecommerce site. That is, unless you spend the time and resources to pump external links into the sidecar, when they’d be better spent building links to the primary optimized ecommerce content.

2. Conversion elements. So let’s say you’ve built the links and you’re getting traffic to the SEO sidecar content. But it doesn’t convert because the conversion elements reside in the motorcycle rather than the sidecar. If you’re going to spend time building quality links to your content, why not just build them to the primary converting ecommerce content you meant to boost when you created the sidecar in the first place?

Summary

To make the SEO sidecar viable as an SEO strategies requires creating excellent content that users will want to consume, building links to it and developing conversion elements to drive sales or subscriptions. All of this is hard work, and the core of a strong SEO strategies. Unfortunately, it’s aimed at propping up the SEO sidecar, which isn’t effective today as an SEO strategy. If similar resources and strategies were applied instead to optimizing the primary ecommerce site, you’d see better results in sorter time. Forget the sidecar, optimize the motorcycle and ride off into the sunset. Or alternately, build an awesome sidecar and integrate it fully with the motorcycle so that the entire site is strengthened.

SEO: Automating Keyword Selection with AdWords API

Optimizing a website around highly searched keyword terms can materially increase traffic from search engines. But identifying those keywords takes time. Few SEO managers relish the tedium of slogging through thousands of keyword variations — as critical as that process is to a search-engine-optimization program.

Thankfully, Richard Baxter at SEO gadget recently released a revolutionary free “Google AdWords API Extension for Excel” that automates the most tedious steps of the keyword research process: pasting keywords into the Google Keyword Tool, clicking search, downloading the results, and repeating many times.

Baxter’s Excel plugin shifts the amount of time spent manually copying and pasting to more rewarding tasks, such as keyword analysis and optimization. The best part is that you don’t have to be an Excel wizard to use it. You’ll need Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010 in 32 or 64 bit to use this plugin, as well as a Google AdWords API. Once you have those pieces, simply download the ZIP file from SEO gadget that includes the plugin and the sample documents to help you understand how to use it. SEOgadget’s blog post goes through all the details, so we’ll focus here on examples of usage.

What Can It Do?

The extension pulls data from the API based on any match type (broad, phrase, exact), country code (U.S., U.K., etc.), and device type (web, mobile, etc.), enabling precise control, such as the following examples.

“Report Keyword Ideas” for a list of products or phrases. Note that the result is a comma separated list in a single Excel cell.

Split the Names

Let’s say that one of those subcategories is called “Bed and Bath.” If the etailer really wants to focus on ranking for “bedding” and “bath accessories,” having a conjoined “Bed and Bath” category is going to make reaching his goal harder. Splitting the subcategory into one for “Bedding” and one for “Bath Accessories” gives the etailer two unique landing pages to optimize specifically for the phrases he needs to rank for. Adding them to the navigation passes link popularity and relevance signals to those pages.

The effectiveness of navigational optimization relies entirely on implementing a crawlable navigation, of course. If the navigation uses complex JavaScript, Flash, or other uncrawlable technologies, the links and anchor text in the navigation will have no benefit to the etailer’s SEO. For more on crawlable navigation, see “Try Surfing Like a Search Engine Spider”, my article on that topic.

Run-of-Site Links Help, Too

Navigational optimization alone won’t send a site to the top of the rankings because navigational link are classified as “run-of-site” links. Because they appear on every page of the site, they pass a vote of relevance and value from every page of the site, but they’re also recognized by search engines for what they are: lower-quality run-of-site links. The highest quality links are “editorial” links, which are typically single links in the body of a page. Editorial links are considered more “earned” and therefore more valuable than run-of-site link. Still, SEO is a war of a thousand small battles. Any battle an ecommerce site can fight and scale across the entire site — like navigation optimization — will likely have higher return than one that must be fought page by page.

A site’s navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass “link popularity,” little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link’s anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and value, or quality, are the foundation of search engine optimization. A site’s navigation has the power to improve both.

Altering the Anchor Text

For example, if a department store has a clothing category and it’s trying to rank for the extremely competitive keyword “clothing,” search engine optimization the navigation will help. Let’s say the navigational link currently links like this:

In this case, the link will still pass popularity but the relevance signal the anchor text passes is “Apparel,” which is lower for the keyword “clothing” than if it were specifically “Clothing,” as in:

Shopping Cart Limitations

The words a site uses in its navigational links are typically tied to prickly issues like content management system limitations, backend database labels, and even print catalog nomenclature. However, if an etailer can force its CMS — a shopping cart, in most instances — to separate the category’s name from the name displayed on the site, a wealth of optimization can occur. URL naming, title tags, meta data and headings are all frequently tied to the category’s name in the CMS.

In addition to optimizing anchor text, optimizing the page being linked to in the navigation is extremely valuable. Let’s say our department store has five categories, and each category has five subcategories. That’s 30 landing pages — 5 category pages plus 25 subcategories — the etailer will want to rank for. When designing the navigation, the etailer has a choice. He can link to his five categories and call it a day, or he can implement rollover menus that enable access to all five subcategories in all five categories. With the rollover option, the etailer is enabling every page on his site to link to all 30 of his most important pages he wants to rank. Each of those 30 pages will be passed a fraction of every page’s link popularity — along with a consistently relevant keyword signal.

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