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Hi - I'm actually talking about the broad match modifier which is a seperate type of match to both phrase and broad - here are some more details: http://www.calculatemarketing.com/blog/techniques/modified-broad-match-adwords-analysis/

I've been investigating the use of modified broad match in my campaigns and I've got some confusing and conflicting information.

If you read: http://www.ppchero.com/modified-broad-match-understood/ it explain 3 scenario's for using modified Broad match.

However what I am experiencing is conflicting with this information.

Suppose I have my modified keyword broad match as:
+KW1 +KW2

According to the information in the article (and my adwords campaign manager), this would NOT match:

KW1 KW2 RandomWord1
KW1 RandomWord1 KW2
RandomWord1 KW1 RandomWord2 KW2 RandomWord3

However this is NOT what I am experiencing! In my modified BM campaigns its is matching ALL the above scenarios.

Am I doing something wrong or am I miss-informed? Anyone know what is going on?

Hi,

I've recently started using Adwords SiteLinks, but I am a bit confused about what the stats are telling me.

The below are my stats on one of my campaings for this week:

Campaigns 1 Summary:
Clicks: 944
Impressions: 8091
CTR: 11.67
Avg CPC: £1.35
Cost: £1,278.95

Campaign 1 Sitelinks:
Clicks: 905
Impressions: 6216
CTR: 14.56
Avg CPC: £1.34
Cost: £1,213.71

As I am not exactly sure how the Sitelinks stats work (as part of stats on the whole campaign), I am struggling to work out what insight I can gain from the above.

Can someone help me decipher these results into some useful points.

Many thanks

First I've seen of this tool. Just from looking at it, it seems like it is replicating google analytics and google website optimiser. I'd be interested to know what it does in addition / better to the free google tools.

You can colour code all you competitors (and your keywords) in AWR, so this may help you do this. Otherwise you can set up multiple campaigns with different sets of competitors and campaigns.

I currently use SEOMOZ Campaigns and Advanced Web Ranking for monitoring our KW rankings and those of competition.

AWR is a brilliant tool with so many different reports, methods of viewing etc. SEOMOZ campaigns are good but don't come close to the monitoring power of AWR (EG I monitor over 50 competitors on over 1000 KW's on a Daily basis with AWR and recieve a variety of set emailed reports on the data). However, one thing that SEOMOZ campaigns have that is useful is the traffic data - but this is still a bit basic and I think could be improved.

The problem with AWR is that it doesn't integrate with your Analytics / Adwords / Google WM Tools - so it is only showing you half the picture.

Knowing how your site ranks for each keyword is helpful, but it would be nice to understand the value of each keyword.  For example, being able to see your rank position and how much traffic that keyword has sent you over time would be helpful. It would also be nice to see the number of searches that are performed for that keyword each month .  For example, lets say I saw that I was ranking at number 11 for “hover mower” and getting 500 hits per month.  Two months from now, if I was ranking at position 7, it would be nice to be able to immediately see how that changed the amount of traffic I was receiving for the term.  Is a position of 11 (first item on page two) better than position 10 (last item on page one)?

If you can link it to your analytics, you could then link it to your goals, and goal values to get a complete picture of where your keywords rank the value of the rank, and the improvment on that value when rank changes.

If browsed around for such software but can't find anything like this - does anyone know of any software that can do this - or something close to this?

Many thanks

Hi,

I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines.

I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty.

All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have:

www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123

All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!)

Thanks

Thanks - Yes the SEOMOZ test is great - I set 3 people tests today and 2 of them got over 95% - Given they only started learning SEO 2 months ago, and only an hour or so a day at that (SEO is not their main job - they are just content editors) - I've either got 2 genius SEO's on my hands or they learnt the test beforehand!!

Hi,

I've got a number of staff in the office that I am trying to get to learn SEO.

I want to be able to test them on their ability and have already set them the SEOMOZ test: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-expert-quiz .

Does anyone know of any other decent online SEO tests I can set them - I haven't really got the time to develop a test myself, so I am looking for some pre-build online testing.

Thanks

Thanks - thats very helpful

Yes I understand that, but then you can go on for ever - so I could have an adgroup

Cheap London Hotels
Hotels cheap in London
Cheap Hotels in London
Etc etc

So when I get down to this level am I better having an ad group with exact matches for every single possible combination, or alternatively using broad match modifier +Cheap +London +Hotels

Thanks

I've seen Rands video on subdomains and best pratices at
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I have a question/theory though and it is related to an issue I am having.

We have built our website, and now we are looking at adding 3rd party forums and blogs etc (all part of one CMS).

The problem is these need to to be on a seperate subdomain to work correctly (I won't go into the specific IT details but this is what I have been advised by my IT guru's).

So I can have something like:
http://cms.mysite.com/forum/

Obviously after reading Rands post and other stuff this is far from ideal.

However I have another Idea - run the CMS from root and the main website from the www. subdomain.

EG
www.mysite.com
mysite.com/blog

Now my theory is that because so many website (possibly the majority - especially smaller sites) don't use 301 redirects between root and www. that search engines may make an exception in this case and treat them both as the same domain, so it could possibly be a way of getting round the issue.

This is just a theory of mine, based solely on my thoughts that there are so many websites out there that don't 301 root to www. or vice versa, that possibly it would be in the SE's self interest to make an exception and count these as one domain, not 2.

What are your thoughts on this and has there been any tests done to see if this is the case or not?

Thanks

I'm trying to get my head round adwords and quality score etc to try and optimise my groups.

I'm a little bit confused about these scenarios:

Suppose I have a an adgroup which targets "London Hotels" - this adgroup targets a single page on my site.

I have masses pof keywords around this term which my page targets such as:
Hotels in London
Good London Hotels
Cheap London Hotels
3* London Hotels
Central London Hotels
etc etc etc

Now I think I have 2 main options for this
Option 1 - Use a broad match modifier with:
+London +Hotels

Option 2 - Use lots of phrase matches like
"Hotels in London"
"London Hotels"

Option 3 - Use hundreds of exact matches like:
[Hotels in London]
[Good London Hotels]
[Cheap London Hotels]
[3* London Hotels]
[Central London Hotels]

Am I correct in assuming that if the searchers KW is an exact match for a KW in your list then your quality rating would be higher - thereby you would on average get a higher listing for less money if you had hundreds of exact matches? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?

Which method would you think is the best solution for my situation?

Thanks

Great - thats extremely helpful

thanks

Suppose I have a adwords campaign, with an adgroup targetting the broad match term "cell phones".

Is it possible to get metrics on the exact keywords users have used to create ad impressions, clicks or conversions for that campaign?

Many thanks

Yes - this is what I would expect - however reading http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule indicates to me there are still a lot of loopholes in the alogrithm, and I was just wondering if this had ever been tested.

Thanks

Thanks.
But are you sure that this is the case even when the link is point to the current page?

Here's a technical question.

Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones".

I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term  "cell phones".

Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"??

Thanks

Like me you may not have heard of the new EU law on cookies - but apparently it is illegal to use cookies on EU websites!! - Apparently came into effect on the 26th of May.

Having read a bit about it, it would be comical if it were not actually true.

Check out these refs - its staggering:
Video: http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/the-stupid-eu-cookie-law-in-2-5-minutes/
ICO making a farce of its own law: http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/current_topics/website_changes_pecr.aspx
More Info: http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/can-we-use-analytics-with-the-new-uk-cookie-law/

I'm so glad the consideral tax my cookie reliant business pays is being put to good use by a bunch of ignorant bureaucratic dicks............

For any website it obviously useful to know about as much of your user behaviour as possible - and part of that involves past user behaviour.

This is generally done by cookies and would involve things like:

• Last Visit Date
• Number of Site Visits
• Number of pages viewed

etc etc

I'm trying to build up a list for my developers so they are trackign the information that, although may not be explicetly useful now, but may be useful for future functionality.

So does anyone have a list of the key things you should always track?