How to Install Google Adwords Editor for Ubuntu (Linux)

Chase — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:30:00 +0000

Recently I found myself needing to install the Google Adwords Editor application and ran into a few issues with this because I am running the most recent version of Ubuntu as my operating system. After a bunch of research and some troubleshooting, I finally had some success installing the Google Adwords Editor in Ubuntu using these 5 simple steps:

Open up your Terminal and follow these steps…

1. Install Wine from the Regular Repository

sudo aptitude install wine

2. Get the Winetricks Script

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

3. Install vcrun2005

sh winetricks vcrun2005

4. Download the Google Adwords Editor (windows version)

http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

5. Install the Google Adwords Editor

msiexec /i adwords_editor_en-US.msi

That’s it! You are done!

You should now be able to go to Applications >> Wine >> Programs >> Google Adwords Editor and run the application. To further this experiment I had a PPC expert use this application on Ubuntu for 8 consective hours completing various tasks and everything worked perfectly.

Leveraging Online Marketing Costs for Improving SEO

Chase — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:22:26 +0000

What do I mean here? Let me explain. Let’s say you run a website or work for a company that has a website that spends money consistently each month on driving traffic to that website. Let’s step it up one more notch and say that you spend in the thousands of dollars range per month in Online Advertising to push traffic and potential business to this website. These methods could include but are not limited to the following:

Paid Search – PPC
Banner/Display Ads
Social Media Advertising like Facebook & Twitter
Email Marketing campaigns
Contexual Advertising like Google Adsense or Kontera
Partnerships with other websites

In most instances your are spending this money on traffic that will no longer exist once you stop paying for it. We all know that Organic Traffic through Google is something that is much more long term, not to mention free. So naturally we segment a portion of our efforts towards SEO to help improve Organic SERP’s. But what if you could gain SEO strength from at least a portion of the $ you are spending in online advertising?

Another more specific way of explaining this question is, what if you could somehow improve your SEO from the hundreds or even thousands of dollars you are spending in Paid Search? Or what about in Email Marketing? Get my question?

Many medium size players on the web naturally will spend thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per month just in advertising costs on the Internet. This is of course justified by the amount of volume they are generating in return by dumping all this money into the web. But what if you could gain SEO value from your advertising costs while still getting the immediate volume you are after? A best of both worlds type of scenario.

With a little bit of creativity and some elbow grease, not to mention some serious brainstorming (which my tiny little brain can only handle once a week without having an emotional breakdown) I came up with a few cool ideas on how to accomplish this.

Tactic #1 – The “Thank You” Resource Page

The idea of the thank you page is to redirect your visitor to a certain page once they have completed whatever it is you wanted them to do, and that certain page contains valuable content such as a download guide or something like it. Along with this great content you have put together would be some social bookmarking icons so they can bookmark this page and share it with their friends.

Think about it. Let’s say your website’s job is to gather leads. Once a visitor has finished filling out a lead form you have already built up some level of trust with that visitor. Take the time to give them some free stuff that can help them, and in return give them the opportunity to “socialize” that page by sharing it with their friends. This will increase the SEO of that particular page, which if the architecture of your site is sound, will increase the SEO of your overall site.

Tactic #2 – The Tracking Pixel or 301/302 Redirect

One of the confilicts that exists between Internet Marketing and SEO is the issue of the Tracking Code URL. What happens is that in order ot track a specific campaign, internet marketers will work with their web analytics platform and append characters at the end of a page’s URL. For example my homepage with all the SEO value is chasesagum.com. But if I wanted to track the progress of say my Email Marketing campaign, I would append something like this… chasesagum.com/index.php?gty&Email-1_Aweber or something like that.

The problem with this URL is that the whole world see’s it. And I lose all sorts of SEO possibilities to that specific page because if people choose to link to that page, they will naturally link to the URL with all the extra characters at the end. To solve this you have 2 choices. First is the Tracking Pixel that tracks allows your Web Analytics platform to track a specific campaigns data without appending characters to the end of the URL.

The other option is to do a 301 redirect which would essentially redirect your funky looking URL to it’s correct destination, so that the user only actually sees the clean URL. In most cases this one should work but you will definitely want to make sure your Web Analytics platform can handle this.

Tactic #3 – The Hard Link Request

This one may sound simple, but many are letting this SEO benefit slip through the cracks. This involves specific partnerships that your Marketing team is creating. What typically happens here is that a Marketing team will build a relationship with a 3rd party site in order to drive traffic. It could be a banner ad, text link etc. Typically this 3rd party site will run your link through an Ad server on their end in order to track things like impressions, clicks and so forth.

When possible, get a natural HTML hard link from a partnership. Rather than having it redirect through an Ad server, see if it can be a hard link directly to you. The amount of link juice that could be passed on to you from this one link could outweigh hundreds, even thousands of your other links.

Tactic #4 – PPC Display URL Redirect

PPC managers often times use fake URL’s as their Display URL’s. They do this in order to create a better display ad that will improve quality score and increase click-through rates. If the website you are dealing with is big enough, you will be surpised to see how many of those URL’s are being linked to throughout the web, which are of course being reported as Page Not Founds in your Google Webmaster tools.

Solution? Do a 301 Redirect in your .htaccess file for all of these URL’s to the specific destination that you desire. That way any link juice that has been generated will be passed on to the page that you redirect to. Nothing like some nice Free SEO effort from your PPC team.

Tactic #5 – Bypassing Ad Networks

Let’s take a big example here. Google Adsense. By advertising in the Google Content Network, your Paid Search team should be aware of all the sites in the Google Content Network that have your website’s ads in them. What if you could bypass Google on a few of these sites and pay those webmasters directly for your ad? Even better, what if you that ad was an HTML hard link rather than passing through Google’s ad servers?

Doing this with too many sites could potentially cause problems, as i’m sure Google would catch on to what you are doing. I recommend finding 10 or 20 sites with very good page rank in your niche, and building relationships with those webmasters for text links off their homepage.

There you go! If your company spends thousands of dollars per month in Online Advertising, imagine how much you can get out of that for SEO? By thinking this way, you help your company solve a more long term goal which is to have more free, organic traffic be larger piece of the monthly traffic pie.

301 Redirects vs 302 Redirects

Adwords Keyword Tool Finally Shows Numerical Data

Chase — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:19:36 +0000

Oh my goodness! Can you believe it? Google has decided to finally give numerical data in it’s ever so popular Adwords Keyword Research Tool! I can literally hear SEM’s all over the world in my head cheering like theres no tomorrow. Although I am not an SEM myself, I do have my share of PPC campaigns and I must say that this makes my life just a little bit easier.

Here’s a little screenshot of what I am talking about here. In the past, Google would just show you a bar graph of the search volume, leaving it up to you to guess how much volume it’s really getting. Now, you get a number next to that of the actual “estimated” search volume.

How many of you stand to benefit from this new Google Adwords Feature?

ChaseSagum.com » SEM