14 Hot Ideas in Free and Paid Search

Are you on top of today’s hottest ideas in free and paid search? Here are 14 easy-to-implement ways to get your site to the top of everyone’s results. Each could support a full article in its own right, so I’ve also provided additional links to help you dig in further.

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
1. Social media sites drive links; links drive rankings. Get familiar with Digg (digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com), Netscape (netscape.com) and Reddit (reddit.com), because these social-media sites can drive huge traffic. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are the rocket fuel powering your organic rankings.

Not all of your content is Digg-worthy, but see if a few times a year you can develop content so compelling that it warrants attention from the social-media tribes.

2. Markup matters. Inbound links are critical, but markup still matters. Use clean, well-formed, validating HTML. Pay special attention to your title tags, and give each page a unique title. Use the robots-nocontent tag to tell the spiders to ignore your navigation.

3. Embrace cascading style sheets (CSS). These separate presentation from content. Well-designed CSS achieves the following:
● your pages load and render more quickly;
● searchbots better understand your page; and
● your site will be friendlier to disabled users and mobile devices. When using JavaScript enhancement, make sure your site degrades gracefully for older browsers. For a thorough explanation of CSS, I suggest you check out www.csszengarden.com.

4. Blogs and RSS. Search engines love fresh content presented at regular intervals in machine-friendly format. Blogs and really simple syndication (RSS) provide just that. With proper publishing pings and tagging, the engines will discover and index your RSS content rapidly. Blogging is another great way to communicate with customers and prospects. There are many good blogging platforms; WordPress (see wordpress.org) is particularly popular given its rich set of plug-ins.

5. Google’s Universal Search offers new opportunities. Launched last May, Google’s Universal Search strives to merge relevant results from across Google’s specialized engines (news, images, video, blogs, etc.) into the core Google search results pages.

Universal Search offers savvy multichannel marketers back-door, first-page results on competitive terms. Provide the engines fresh and relevant images, video, blog posts and press releases that are suitably tagged and marked up.

6. Great free apps. Among the many free tools Google provides for AdWords advertisers, Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) is a powerful application for understanding how visitors reach and use your site. Google Website Optimizer (services.google.com/websiteoptimizer) is handy for multivariate testing.

Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
1. Brand vs. nonbrand. Many multichannel marketers enjoy large sales with little cost on searches for their brand name. These searches aren’t incremental, however. Analyze your campaigns both with and without your branded terms. Challenge your paid search agency or in-house team to drive profitable sales growth out of your nonbrand portfolio.

2. Beware of broad match and content networks. Broad match allows the search engines some leeway in matching your ads against similar search queries. While broad match is a convenient tool and appropriate in some circumstances, often that additional traffic is of lower quality.

Test what happens to your pay-per-click (PPC) sales and your PPC costs when you remove broad match from your top terms. You may find considerable benefit.

As with broad match, syndicating your ads to the content networks can offer you greater click inventory. But again, this additional traffic can be of lower quality, increasing your PPC costs with minimal sales benefit.

For one thing, know if you’re running ads on the content networks. If so, test to determine if the additional costs are warranted by additional sales. There are good clicks to be found hidden in the content haystack, but finding them takes effort and care.

3. Bid for profit, not position. If you’re concerned with impressions and branding, bid your pay-per-click campaigns to hold your ads in the top positions. If, on the other hand, you’re concerned about profitable sales, bid your ads based on your economics.

Long-Tail Term Bidding
Track cost and sales at the ad (not ad group) level, and use statistical clustering approaches to help you bid your long-tail terms efficiently. All bid management systems are not created equal. Top-notch bid management algorithms pay for themselves many times over in incremental profit.

4. Comprehensive term lists. There’s great value in the long tail of search terms, and comprehensive term lists are your ticket to capturing that value. As a rule of thumb, test a number of terms equal to four to six times the number of pages on your site, expecting about a quarter or a third of those terms to have sufficient traffic and performance to merit ongoing funding in your campaigns.

For example, an online marketer with 4,500 SKUs and a 5,000-page Web site should test 20,000 to 30,000 terms, expecting 5,000 to 10,000 of these terms to work long-term.

Keyword counts (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) can be inflated artificially with no benefit — for example, by pre-pending “buy” or post-pending “online” — your object is real unique phrases with actual traffic and marketing opportunities.

5. Build rational ad groups. Your Google campaigns will perform better when you group ads semantically. Sensible ad groups help your performance on the content networks and also can improve your quality score. (See adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html.)

6. Quality score matters. Google ranks ads by a combination of maximum bid and quality score. Quality score is a function of clickthrough rate, landing page relevance and additional secret factors. To avoid quality score concerns, write targeted and compelling copy, ensure that your destination URLs tightly match the ad phrase and ad copy, and don’t launch new campaigns with artificially low costs per click.

7. Conversion is the ultimate PPC battleground. In the long run, multichannel marketers who get the most from each paid click to their site can afford to pay the most for those clicks. Do everything you can to increase site conversion.

Offer great merchandise, fair pricing, free or reduced shipping, strong guarantees, shopper-friendly return policies, user testing, multivariate site testing, Web-effectiveness projects and so on, and you'll do fine.

Increasing your sales-per-visit metric allows you to invest more in advertising. Higher bids place your ad higher on the page, scaling your sales and profits considerably.

Both SEO & SEM
1. My SERPs aren’t your SERPs. Increasingly, search engines serve customized search engine results pages (SERPs) based on profiles and prior searches. To view search results without this user-specific “contamination,” use Firefox and install the CookieSwap add-on. Also, try Google’s Ad Preview tool to see your paid results as a normal searcher does.

Hopefully some of these tidbits spark new ideas for you — best of luck with all your search marketing efforts!

Alan Rimm-Kaufman is CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online paid search and Web-effectiveness consulting firm. You can reach him online at www.rkgblog.com.