Yahoo announced today some much needed feature updates to their PPC platform. Yahoo now lets you copy and move keywords from one ad group to another. As to why it took so long for such a simple but required function to be implemented will still remain a mystery to everyone.

In addition to the move and copy, they have also steamlined the keyword selection process and updated the help section with some best practices guide.

Yahoo is getting there, slowly but surely. Keep taking pages out of Google’s book…

People often have a general idea of what is involved in SEO, but they tend to focus on one or two particular variables. The truth of the matter is there are a lot more. Some are more important than others, but singling out specific ones ignores the long tail effect. The little things add up and can make a huge difference.

Here are all the things that can POSITIVELY impact your positioning, in no particular order:

• Domain name
• URLs
• Content and keyword density
• Number of pages
• HTML formatting
• Title tags, meta tags
• Internal linking
• External linking
• How long the site has been active
• Competition
• Frequency of updates

Conversely, here are things, exclusive of blackhat practices, that NEGATIVELY impact your positioning that can be easily avoided:

• Duplicating content within sites
• Duplicating entire websites
• The same title tag on every page
• No sitemap
• No custom 404 error pages

In general, we’d recommend sticking to GREAT content, clean code and healthy flow of relevant inbound links.

How valuable is Google’s Quality Score? Should it be an influential metric for your PPC campaigns?

According to Google, “Your Quality Score reflects your keyword’s CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high Quality Scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower minimum CPC bids.”

Keywords can have one of three Quality Score states:

• Great: Your keyword is very relevant and your Quality Score needs no improvement.
• OK: Your keyword is relevant, but you can still benefit from a higher Quality Score.
• Poor: This keyword isn’t very relevant to users and we suggest you replace it with a more specific keyword. If you would like to keep advertising with this keyword, we recommend optimizing by using more targeted ad text and improving your landing page content.

To learn more about how the quality score is calculated, visit AdWords Help.

To view your quality score, go to the keyword level of your campaigns and click customize columns. There will be an option to ‘Show Quality Score.’

Interested in learning more about Google’s Quality Score, I contacted support. There are several intersting things that I learned:

• The Quality Score is not yet a column that can be added to your reports (So how do I find the keywords that Google considers to be “Poor” and “need optimizing” according to Google?)
• The Quality Score algorithm is constantly changing and if it were on a report you “may not want to make a decision based on that data.”

In our opinion, the quality score is not valuable in of itself. There are so many variables that contribute to the success of a keyword that to perform an evaluation based on this metric alone would be short-sighted.

We recommend keeping an eye on keywords Google deems to have a “Poor” Quality Score (we haven’t found any yet in our campaigns) and evaluate if there is an opportunity for improvement.

For my last article I did a search for the Ron Popeil website.

As you can see from the results above, Ronco, the official Ron Popeil website comes up as #2 out of 109,000 results. Now, you are probably thinking to yourself “how could that not be good?” See SERP

Take a closer look. The title of the link says it all - “Ronco Ecommerce Administration”

The only result on the first three pages is to the administrative login to the Ronco ecommerce site. Not good. Click on the link and the only thing you see if a login box asking for a username and password.

Moral of the story:

• Be aware of what Google has indexed on your site (search ’site:www.yourdomainname.com’) and the results displaying for various searches (branding keywords, topic keywords, etc)
• Create a robots.txt ahead of time to prevent indexing of pages that are for internal use only

Don’t worry, there are short term and long term solutions for these circumstances.

Ron Popeil and his Rotisserie Cooker are famous for the catch phrase “Just Set it and Forget It.” While this approach may work wonders for perfectly cooking a nice juicy chicken, it will leave your pay per click budget dry and the results unsatisfying.

A successful PPC campaign requires constant monitoring and adjustment. Many companies setup PPC campaigns on their own and don’t touch them for months. Over time things change, like ad serving algorithms, searching behavior and most importantly competition. If you are setting up a campaign and plan to just let it run on its own, you are better investing in Google stock, the ROI is probably higher.

If you are prepared to do the ongoing work, here are some things to keep an eye on:

• Top performing keywords - what is driving the most traffic and ultimately the most conversions?
• Budget allocation - are less important keywords using up all of your budget?
• Click through rate - how well are your ads doing? do you need to write more compelling ads?
• Ad distribution - search results vs. content networks - are the content networks eating up your budget?
• Keyword bids and ad position - how has competition and ad performance affecting these?
• Average cost per click - is it going up? down? why?
• Conversion rate - which keywords perform the best?
• Geo-targeting and the long tail - can you refine your keywords to be more specific?