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Our good and sometimes evil friend over at Google are always squeezing the algorithms in how they rank your paid listings against your competitors that are buying the same keywords in an effort to show and reward relevance. This can be a frustrating game for mom and pop shops and agencies to manage as keywords very important to your business can be turned off in a flash without any warning.

Here are some best practices that I teach and use to stay in good graces with the ‘mean’ algorithm:

1. Keyword Insertion. This is a super-duper important one to use whenever possible. Here is the tag and a good secret that not everyone is aware of: {KeyWord: YourName.com}. What basically happens when you use this tag is that the keyword or phrase search will get inserted as the link title and will be capitalized only if you capitalize both the “K” and the “W” (That’s the secret). By including your domain name or trade name then that’ll appear if the keyword phrase is too long as they won’t truncate it for you. I could almost stop right there as this step is so overlooked by most SEM shops. The other great benefit is that your keywords will be “Bolded” when displayed which usually results in higher CTR and lower bid pricing.

2. Use the Keyword or Keyword phrase in the description text field. I didn’t realize until recently how important this was in making sure that your are buying relevant keywords. If you have to break out and build new smaller ad group buckets then take the time to do it on important keyword(s). Google takes this into the consideration factor when weighing out your quality score.

3. Your Display URL. I as a measure of best practice always Capitalize my URL’s and don’t put the www. in front of them. Example: Meeta.com instead of www.meeta.com. It just jumps out at you more and is easier to read and remember.

4. CAPITALIZATION. While we are on the topic this might be the second most important best practice to follow to a “T”. You will end up fighting your brand managers and anal copywriters but don’t sleep on this one at all. Hold the line. Capitalize The First Letter On The Ad Description Text So That It Jumps Off The Page.

Example of all 4 Best Practices in play:

Your ad should look like:
{KeyWord: Meeta.com}
100% Free Dating Service!
Meet Local Singles Today.
Meeta.com

Another quick tip is that you can use superlatives in your ad description. I usually try to get a good short call to action and one exclamation point in the ad.

I’ll do another article on landing page optimization soon and how to use the Google conversion counter free tool.

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I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.

-Brian

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I attended Danny Sullivan’s sort of new SMX Advanced conference here in Seattle this week and was walking around the exhibitor areas looking to see if there was anything new to report and the best booth stop of the morning for me was at the Microsoft Advertising booth. I talked to a guy that was super informed on the new MSN adCenter Desktop tool that is currently in Beta right now and he gave me a preview of the tool and I was super excited that MSN beat Yahoo to the punch to match a tool that Google has had in the marketplace for quite sometime now. Here are some features of the adCenter Desktop tool:

• Bulk editing bid prices
• Bulk editing destination URLs
• Ad Group geo-targeting
• Uploading changes instantly to your Account
• Set and monitor bid and CTR alerts
• Keyword research tool and optimization (see monthly search traffic and demographic data for keywords)
• Create campaigns with wizard tool
• Ability to view and manage multipule accounts

I know you are about as excited as I was to hear this news and you are just about to leave to go search MSN Live for a link on downloading the tool. Here is the link for you:

MSN adCenter Desktop Tool Beta

You can either sign-up online for the pilot or contact your Account Executive to get you access. I know everyone including myself can’t wait for MSN to acquire Yahoo so we can put a dent in Google’s empire on paid search.

MSN also recently updated their Microsoft Advertising logo. I went searching around for the new logo that I first saw in my Account Executive’s signature file on email. It was interesting to see Microsoft’s progression of logos for Adcenter. I have included a few below that I found. Remember that Microsoft launched the MSN butterfly logo way back on Feb. 14th, 2000.

New Microsoft Advertising Logo:

Here is another great adCenter resource if you have any questions or are an API develop:
Microsoft adCenter Community

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Google and its child

As a search engine, Google’s primary purpose is to locate and organize that little thing known as the internet. Acting as the intermediary between information and the end-user, such as yourself, Google allows users to enter a search query and click search.

Google returns a multitude of resuslts: web pages, files, websites, images; these results are displayed on the left side of the page. Unlike other search engines, Google doesn’t accept pamyent to place websites higher in the search results.  However, Google does allow advertisers to purchase an AdWords ads which appear in parallel with unpaid results.

Why AdWords?

Each month over 80% of Internet users in the US view AdWords Ads…and this doesn’t even include the hundreds of millions of additional worldwide users! AdWords allows you to create simple, effective ads to display to people who are already looking for something related to your business. Gone are the days of irrelevant banner ads, Google has ushered in a new era of keyword-based advertising.

Let’s say you’re looking for some baseball tickets to the Mariner’s game, you’d likely search for "mariners tickets." In addition to search results, Google would display ads on top of and to the right of your search results. Say you’re buying media against the keyword "mariners tickets", you could be advertising directly towards individuals already looking for your products!

If this excites you, check this out…just recently, AdWords has branched out from solely internet advertisting to print, radio, TV, image, video and mobile ads.

But I only offer local products or services!

Great! It’s a common misconception that just because you offer local services and don’t ship products, you won’t see a benefit from an AdWords campaign. AdWords allows you you to target ads to specific geographic locations. If you were buying keywords for your massage business, users searching for "seattle flower shops" would see your ads, but users searching for "portland flower shops" would not. Not only will you appear on Google’s search pages, if selected, you would be eligible to appear on Google maps (maps.google.com) and any other sites that have opted into Google’s search network.

I don’t have a large budget to burn

One of the beauties of AdWords is the complete and total control it offers. You can run a media campaign without any minimum spending requirement. You set your budget, and AdWords works with you. By selecting different advertising models you control whether you pay for actual clicks, known as cost-per-click (CPC); or whether you pay for actual ad views, known as cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).

You can run a successful campaign for $10 a day!

In closing

AdWords offers businesses an avenue to reach an audience that is highly relevant, and highly receptive. There’s no way I can cover all the features in a quick article. If you’re interested in pursuing an AdWords campign, feel free to do poke around at the Google AdWords site or send me an email.

One of the biggest changes in Rails 2.0 is the way the framework pimps RESTful design.

??!@#$%^&*??

My thoughts exactly. Understanding what REST was/did/accomplsiehd was a bit of a struggle for me, hopefully, I can do a good job of breaking the concept down into tasty, digestible portions.

Disclaimer:
If you’re a robotic code monkey like myself, my over-simplified terminology may anger you. By all means, if I am incorrect, which I often am…correct me…but please…think of the kids! Don’t nitpick, it’s just not cool.

The HTTP Request

Before I can explain what REST is, you need to have a basic understand of how your web browser communicates with web servers. Let’s start with something you are familiar with. When you visited my blog, this is what happened:

1. You typed in www.jonathansng.com

2. Your browser sent a request to the server

3. My server responded with HTML

4. Your browser rendered that HTML

Well…beneath all this seemingly simple transaction, a few more, albeit important things are occurring. Using the same example as above, this is what is really happening:

1. You typed in www.jonathansng.com

2. Your browser sent a request to the server (called an HTTP request)

3. My server responded to that HTTP request

4. Your browser rendered the HTML that was returned

A HTTP request is like a little sticky note that is passed on to the web server. When the web server gets this note, it can read over the note and determine what action it needs to take place. There are eight different kinds of HTTP requests.

There are two kinds of requests that you should be most comfortable with. The “GET” request and the “POST” request. The “GET” request does exactly what it states, it gets the content of some resource from the server, identified by the URL Working with HTML, it should come as no surprise that the “POST” request is used to send (or POST) data to a URL, eventually creating a new resource.

Resources

I hate to use technical jargon, but some things can’t be side-stepped. Okay, take a deep breath and clear your mind. Stop thinking of the internet as “web pages”, from now on when you’re in Rails land, you need to think of the internet as a “resource.”

You might be a little bit confused, because as I’m writing this, I’m trying to think of a good example. Okay.

Let’s say you click through my site…the about résumé, my portfolio, and about me page. Web pages right? Wrong. These are resources! Take my résumé for example; if I printed it out on paper and handed it to you, it’d still contain everything you’d see if you would have accessed it on the web…but now it’s on paper! What if I took a screen capture and saved it as a JPG; or how about an Adobe PDF? Do you see where I’m going with this?

The “web page” you accessed was just one way to format the resource, in this case, my résumé.

The OTHER HTTP requests

Stick with me for a little while longer. Earlier, I mentioned there were eight types of HTTP requests, well here are all of the HTTP requests:

1. HEAD
2. GET
3. POST
4. PUT
5. DELETE
6. TRACE
7. OPTIONS
8. CONNECT

All I want is for you to be aware of these request types, I’m sure you already guess what a few of these do, but don’t freak out if you have no idea.

Let’s tie it all together

Let’s use our Bookstore application as an example. Now, what if I were to tell you this URL could do two different things:

• http://localhost:3000/books/1

Say what? Do you remember what I said about HTTP requests?

Okay…imagine this…say you want to view book #1, when you click the above URL you are sending a HTTP “GET” request to the server; once the server gets your HTTP request it responds with the information you requested, in this case the title and description for book #1.

Well, after reading over the description I’ve decided book #1 sucks. I want to delete it. If you mouse over the “Destroy” URL for the bookstore app, you’ll notice the URL is as follows:

• http://localhost:3000/books/1

Hey wait…that’s the same URL as the “Show” link! You are 100% correct. So how can one URL serve multiple purposes? You guessed it, the HTTP request!

When you click the “Destroy” link, you’re sending a HTTP “DELETE” request to the web server. When the web server gets your request it sees you want to DELETE book #1.

Crazy.

Take some time to let this all soak in, it’s actually quite important. You’ll see just how important this RESTful design is when we start digging into our Bookstore application.

You may have noticed I haven’t explained what REST actually stands for, honestly, I have no idea, does it really matter….probably not, but if you’re particularly curious, Wikipedia has the no-nonsense low down on everything we’ve discussed and then some.

I think this is a good point to take a break, not to mention it’s 11PM and I want to play Call of Duty 4. Recently, I added my blog to feedburner, if you want an instant update when I add a new post, subscribe! As usual, leave me a comment for better or worse…if you’re feeling like a badass you can even Digg this or donate to my beer fund!

Until next time folks….

The next tutorial has been published: Rails’ Relationships

Alexa recently released news that they have “better rankings,” and “improved methodology” and have moved past using their Alexa Toolbar as one of the main sources for its rankings. I have always called Alexa the CEO’s site meter tool as the toolbar itself wasn’t even available for MACs. I think every CEO or marketing manager has installed the toolbar at one point in time to check their ranking and it has been used widely by marketing professionals as a research tool for competitive intelligence.

I haven’t used the site or toolbar in over a year and for comparative site reporting I usually frequent sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com which the industry and website owners have implemented and are using in great numbers to report on their own demographics and to share information to their vertical or category for ranking. These two services have free features and provide pretty detailed information for general comparison reporting or trending. If you have the cash to pay for yearly access to Hitwise, comScore or Nielsen’s net ratings then let me know so you can run a few reports for me too. Those subscriptions are costly and I haven’t seen much value in them unless you are in an interesting vertical and are looking for websites to advertise on that you might not have realized were in your demographic.

I wish sites like 100Hot.com still existed and MediaMetrix still published their top 100 website report online for free. I think I’ll give Alexa another try and see if they are delivering something worthwhile now.

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I was milling over some old PHP code today, funny, because my friend Norm linked me to David Hansson’s blog post…it looks like PHP is a Friday thing!

After looking at my old code, I thought to myself, hmm, what better time to showcase the beauty of Rails. I made a post on a message board I frequent, and there was quite a bit of discussion. Anyways, take a look at this!

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header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
include_once('inc.functions.php');
require('inc.drawrating.php');
 
$uid = $_GET['uid'];
 
$conn= mysql_connect("localhost","db","dbpassword") or die (mysql_error());
mysql_select_db(ave_development) or die(mysql_error());
 
 
$q = "SELECT views FROM stores WHERE uid=$uid";
$result = mysql_query($q,$conn);
$tmp = mysql_fetch_object($result);
$views = $tmp->views;
$views++;
 
$lview = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
$q = "UPDATE stores SET views=$views, last_view='$lview' WHERE uid=$uid";
mysql_query($q, $conn);
 
$q = "select * from stores where uid = $uid";
$result = mysql_query($q,$conn);
$row = mysql_fetch_object($result);
 
$name = $row->name;
$phone = $row->phone;
 
if ($phone == 0) { $phone = ""; } else { $phone = " - " . format_phone($phone); }
 
$description = $row->description;
$description_lb = str_replace("\n", "<br>", $row->description);
 
$address = $row->address1;

This is the code I would use if I were to do the same thing in Rails.

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# the controller
class StoresController < ApplicationController
 @store = Store.find_by_id(params[:id])
 @store.increment!("views")
end

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# I'd place this in my 'show' view
<%= number_to_phone(@store.phone) if @store.phone.exists? -%>
<%= simple_format(@store.description) -%>

April 2nd was the cumulation of four months of work, yesterday we launched Meeta.com our free dating website. Using a rapid development framework, known to all of you guys as Ruby on Rails, we’ve been able to move from conceptual models to a production stable product in a very short amount of time!

Along the way, I’ve seen first had the power of Rails, the benefit of RESTful design, and the necessity of comprehensive test coverage. Drop in, sign up, check it out! Now that we’ve hit our beta launch
date, I’ll be back with even more Rails tidbits that I’ve learned
during these four months

71-37-25-72:trunk jon$ rake stats
(in /Users/jon/Sites/meeta.com/trunk)
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers          |  2071 |  1683 |      37 |     214 |   5 |     5 |
| Helpers              |   342 |   293 |       0 |      32 |   0 |     7 |
| Models               |  1766 |  1364 |      38 |     165 |   4 |     6 |
| Libraries            |   458 |   340 |       5 |      48 |   9 |     5 |
| Integration tests    |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Functional tests     |  2106 |  1730 |      36 |     249 |   6 |     4 |
| Unit tests           |  1176 |   935 |      38 |     145 |   3 |     4 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |  7919 |  6345 |     154 |     853 |   5 |     5 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
  Code LOC: 3680     Test LOC: 2665     Code to Test Ratio: 1:0.7

Google recently announced a major update to their display URL policy in AdSense ads in an effort to further incorporate landing page quality to their bid and CTR algorithm which determines what position your ad appears and how relevant the keyword that you are buying is to your landing page.

What do I need to know about the updated display URL policy?

Based on feedback from both our advertisers and users, and consistent with our efforts to present relevant results, we’ll no longer allow certain exceptions to our display URL policy. These include, but aren’t limited to, redirects and vanity URLs. In line with our existing policy, we’ll continue to require that your ad’s display URL matches its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). This policy will be strictly enforced for new ads, regardless of previous exceptions. For more details about the current display URL policy, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47173

.

Here are some other important aspects of the policy you may want to keep in mind:

Tracking URLs - Your ads will be approved if the URL of your landing page domain matches that of your display URL domain.

For example, the following would be acceptable:
• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.google.com

However, this example would be unacceptable:
• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

Sub-Domains

The use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will continue to be acceptable, provided the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.
For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:
• sub.google.com
• google.com/extratext
• www.google.com/extratext

Quality Score

Note that changing your display URL may affect your ad’s Quality Score and ad position.

Keyword URLs

Keyword URLs are considered your destination URL (the URL of your landing page); your ad’s display URL must match its destination URL.

Next Steps

While no immediate action will be taken on existing ads, we encourage you to make the necessary changes to all ads within your account. This will ensure that your ads run without being disrupted by future disapprovals related to this policy enforcement. Visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6272 for step-by-step instructions for editing your display URL.

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I qualified last week and am now an AdWords Professional and our company, Add Three, is now an AdWords Qualified Company!

Those of you who are managing AdWords media campaigns should seriously look into the AdWords qualification. The training program offers a plethora of information, some of it will even be information that is new to you! The training program is 9 sections long, encompassing everything from initial signup all the way to the developer API. To become certified, you must meet some prerequisites:

• pass the test with 75% or greater within the 1h 30min test window
• have an account in good standing for t least 90 days 
• for an individual, manage a 90 day ad spend of $1,000 or $100,000 in the US (this varies by country) 

As an AdWords Professional Google will offer you access to the My Client Center, API access, the Qualified Individual/Company designation, and some other miscellaneous perks.

Learn more about the program at the Google AdWords Professional page.