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Sometimes marketers can’t see the forest for the trees. As search engine optimization has gained so much attention the past few years, I’ve noticed that many marketers focus so much on rank and subsequent traffic, they forget the step that actually occurs in between.

The first event that happens when a user searches for a keyword is that they are met with a search engine results page (SERP). That search engine results page lists the search results, utilizing a page title and a description. Most descriptions are taken directly from a page’s meta description tag. If the meta tag doesn’t exist, the search engine will utilize an excerpt of the page’s content.

Google doesn’t guarantee that they’ll accept and display the meta description, but I’ve honestly not seen a lot of examples where they didn’t. I’ve made some incredible gains in ranking and click-through rates by optimizing the meta descriptions. The gains come from effective keyword usage (ranking) and writing compelling descriptions (click-through rate or CTR).

Here’s an example search, for best stocks to buy:

It’s fairly obvious which result is the most compelling result to click on, isn’t it?

• The first result not only utilizes the keywords best, stocks, and buy… they also utilize the term today… with a call to action, Click to find more now!
• Some of the other listings have dates listed with them. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that Google does a terrible job of snagging this date. If you had a related post with a date down the page from 5 years ago, Google may use that date listed! Try to avoid having dates in your content – they’ll date both the content as well as make your search engine result look like it’s untimely.
• Notice some of the descriptions are not relevant to the actual search or even the keywords… either the site has a default meta description across all the pages that’s static and unrelated, or no meta description at all and Google is just pulling some other content.

The latest changes in Webmaster’s tools actually make it quite simple to monitor!

Search engine optimization isn’t simply using keywords, re-organizing site components and getting ranking, it’s also ensuring that you are improving the click-through rate (CTR) from your well-placed search engine results to drive relevant and additional traffic to your site. The overall goal of SEO isn’t simply ranking and traffic, it’s revenue and a SEO return on investment.

Monitor both your ranking and your click through rates… and adjust your meta descriptions to increase relevant traffic and conversions!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Here’s a typical example of the ranking stats for competitive keywords for one of our clients:

Each line represents a keyword, and the Y-Axis is their ranking as recorded by Authority Labs. Less than 2 months in, and we’re about to get them on page 1. Within 6 months, we’ll really have some great rank for them. With over 20 clients, we absolutely know what it requires to get a site ranked well. One of our major clients is now ranking #1 for 3 of the highest competitive terms in their industry, as well as a handful of other terms that they are on page 1 for and improving.

On-site SEO isn’t a secret. Here’s what we do:

• Make sure analytics is properly installed and that we’re getting good statistics on what the baseline is that we’re working from. We validate the keywords that are driving traffic are actually relevant to the business we’re wanting to do on the site. We also try to incorporate measuring conversions… sometimes the traffic you’re getting isn’t necessarily driving money to your business. It’s important to differentiate the two.
• Do keyword research utilizing Adwords, SEMRush and SpyFu to gain insight into keywords we’re currently ranking for, what we’re not ranking for, and what the competition is ranking for. This will provide terms for us to target. We target terms that we already have ranking for that we know we can push into higher ranking… hopefully #1 ranking.
• Make sure the site’s hierarchy is tuned in to the actual keyword strategy and authority we want it to attain. (example: product categories that we want to rank well are linked to through site navigation or singled out in great links within the home page content). After Google’s most recent algorithm changes, we pushed our clients to ‘flatten’ out there sites so they are broad rather than deep. That means more secondary pages, but keeping third level pages and beyond to a bare minimum.
• Make sure the site has a robots file, sitemaps, and is registered with webmasters from each major search engines so we can monitor how the search engine is finding and indexing the content, as well as pointing out any problems.
• Make sure the site has pages or the blog has posts that speak directly to the keywords or terms that are synonymous (if you do a search on a keyword, look to the bottom of the search engine results page to find the synonymous terms). This means utilizing the keyword at the beginning of page titles, at the beginning of meta descriptions, in headings, in the beginning of content, and within the content of the page (within strong or bold tags).
• Some clients have great authority (meaning that Google ranked them high based on their domain’s history relative to the search terms they were competing for). Others don’t have authority so we have to drive strategies that increase their authority. This is accomplished by ensuring they are linked to from other key domains that rank well for specific keywords or industry segments. This takes a ton of work, it’s where we rely heavily on Slingshot SEO.
• Last… we make sure they continue to get conversions. This sometimes requires optimization techniques, designing calls-to-action, and customizing landing pages. However, we know that rank and traffic don’t mean anything if we’re not actually driving dollars to the business’ bottom line.

Actively pursuing guest blogs, publishing press releases, actively commenting or participating in social sites relevant to the keyword is necessary. This is where search and social media begin to overlap. Promoting your content is becoming key… not just for driving traffic but also for driving links back to your site.

Of course, all of this sounds simple… but it’s not. Having the right tools, understanding how to implement analytics and monitor conversion rates, and being able to decipher all the pieces of data – analytics, webmaster, rankings, keywords, etc. is a difficult juggling act. Our clients pay us to do just that… and we educate them in the process as well.

Some internal guys and even other SEO consultants debate our tactics… but it’s hard to argue when you’re #1.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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PPC is highly competitive and the inflated keyword costs make it that much more difficult to compete. As a small business owner, if you are certain to be outranked in the search engines for popular phrases relating to your services, it’s first important to acknowledge that you may get trampled unless you start looking in other places on the web to attract traffic. Erik Whaley at Search Engine Journal points out some effective PPC tips for small business owners. You don’t have to abandon your PPC efforts, just re-think your strategy.

Having a landing page that isn’t relevant to your PPC campaign not only confuses users, it also confuses Google. In addition to matching your landing page message to your PPC campaign, you should also optimize your landing page for relevant keywords that you are buying. Giovanna over at PPC Blog has some tips on making sure your page is structured in the most efficient manner to maximize free traffic and to keep the visitors from making a quick exit.

Sometimes Internet searchers can be a little impatient. We know what we want and we want to find it now. Adding sitelinks to your PPC ads can help improve your CTR and ROI. By adding additional text to your Ads the benefit is two folds. 1. You are able to give searchers more information about your site and possibly your product and 2. Your ad will take up more space, increasing odds that a searcher will see it. Sinead from Redfly put together a great tutorial for adding sitelinks

Mobile web access is here to stay, and while many of us use smart phones to access information on the web, many marketers are not taking advantage of the opportunities available. David Ward at Clickz.com tells us, only about a quarter of marketers surveyed are using social or mobile advertising. The real take away here is that there is a huge opportunity to get to the mobile party first. By ramping up or simply starting your mobile PPC campaigns now you can already be ahead of three quarters of the competition. If you need more proof check out Micheal Martin’s piece. You don’t want to be late to mobile search marketing.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

To date, I’m not sure I’ve found a more detailed whitepaper on measuring the value of search engine optimization until reading Slingshot’s recent Whitepaper, How to Value SEO. There are some other sites that have developed similar whitepapers, but this is the first time I’ve seen it explained for someone with an MBA to fully understand.

The document walks any reader, with the use of a spreadsheet and free tools available from Google, to analyze and calculate the value of getting ranked. Included in the whitepaper are:

1. Valuing SEO as a Comp Analysis
2. Annual Value of a First Page Google Ranking
3. Annual Value of a First Page Ranking Across All Search Engines
4. Annual Value of Long-Tail Derivative Rankings
5. Valuing Long Term Organic Rankings
6. Calculating Present Value of First Page Rankings

Slingshot has exploded as a national leader in gaining top rankings for its clients on highly competitive terms because they fully understand the importance of both on-site and off-site search engine optimization efforts (including social media). As a business, Slingshot’s understanding of the value that their efforts bring to clients has grown their company at a spectacular rate, named one of the top companies to watch in Indiana. Disclosure: I’m thankful that I recognized Slingshot’s talent early on and have built one heck of a partnership with them.

Did you ever wonder what the annual value of a First page Google Ranking is for a highly competitive term like Health Insurance? How’s $7,471,194 sound? That’s exactly what it would cost, though, to bid and win enough ads to gain the same number of visits per year (840k at $8.90 per click). The Five-Year Net Present Value moves that number to nearly $100,000,000. (You’ll have to read the whitepaper to understand why that’s an accurate assessment).

Your SEO may not be worth as much, but it is time that you stop thinking about search engine optimization as another marketing expense and begin to start valuing it as an investment that can turn your company around – especially in this economy.

The estimated investment for a company to gain first page ranking for Health Insurance is $200,000 the first year and $50,000 each year after to maintain the ranking. That’s a very nice return on investment and a fraction of the cost of what it would take to obtain that same traffic in traditional media.

Download the Whitepaper from Slingshot SEO.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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You spend the time to develop the right keyword list and write very targeted ads to help increase your traffic, click through rate and ultimately quality score. But that is only one piece of the equation – where are you sending those visitors once they click? Your landing page is the first visual introduction to your brand and it should bring a positive experience to the user. To help make sure you are getting the most out of your landing pages, I have put together a list of best practices.

Before optimizing your page, it is important to understand how users see your page. People read a landing page similar to how they would a book or magazine – they scan from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That means you need to put your message across the top and the next most important piece on the right. Keeping this basic pattern in mind will help while you take a look at your copy, images and conversion form to help improve your landing page performance.

While these are a list of best practices, there isn’t a sure fire formula that works for everyone. As with all things in PPC, it is important to test variations until you find the right combination that works for you. The Google Website Optimizer tool is a great way to test different pages to see which elements perform best and are contributing to a higher conversion rate.

Make sure your headline is visible and relevant. Headlines should be relevant to the user, convey your key benefit and be located at the top where the user is going to look first. Try to work in your keyword into the headline to help a visitor confirm they clicked on the correct ad and improve your PPC quality score. Ask yourself if the headline reinstates the users potential problem or gives a brief definition of the service/product offering. If yes, then you are on the right track.

People don’t actually read landing pages, they scan. Think about it, when was the last time you read an entire landing page top to bottom? Keep your copy short, sweet and to the point. Give the important facts and experiment with using paragraph form versus a bulleted list of short statements. You might find that a bulleted list performs much better.

Design a clean, simple and visually appealing landing page. A few images can help bring a page to life, but keep images to a minimum. A landing page should lend itself to a quick and simple recognition of the ‘key message’ and should not be confusing. Too many images, callouts or messages create clutter and confuse a user. Keep in mind that visitors have likely been searching through several ads and landing pages before getting to yours, if they don’t quickly see what they are looking for, they are gone. You have 3-6 seconds to get your message across, make sure your visitors doesn’t spend that time trying to focus their eyes.

Strategically position your conversion form on the right. Going back to how people read landing pages, after scanning the headline, a visitor’s eyes are going to move to the right. If you have a conversion form, place it on the right-hand side to follow the behavior. If you have a shopping cart button instead, follow the same logic. Make sure any required fields are marked with an asterisk or similar notation. If you have a phone number field that won’t accept dashes or dots between numbers, explain this and provide an example so people aren’t discouraged if it doesn’t work correctly. They will not try to submit multiple times, so make sure it is as straightforward as possible.

Simplify your conversion form. Cut down the conversion or contact form to as few fields as possible to help minimize the visitor’s perceived risk of submitting information. Do you ever use the telephone number to follow up with customers? If not, don’t make it a required field as you may be funneling out valuable leads by requiring the information. Users consider what information is being requested and how long is it going to take to fill out the form before deciding which action to take next. If users feel you are asking too much based on what they are getting in return, they are gone. Sometimes it is better to get more conversions with less information than to get very few conversions but a complete history and profile on a person. Make sure you weigh what is important for your business strategy and adjust accordingly.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Headlines, forms, and call to action should all be on the top third of the page in order to help guarantee a visitor sees it. Make sure you prioritize the elements on your page along with your content – if you don’t prioritize it for your user, they will on their own and may take away the wrong message or action.

Tell people what they are getting, in plain English. No one wants to submit personal information unless they are sure they know what they are getting. No matter what you are offering, whether it is a PDF whitepaper download, catalog in the mail or simply a request for a follow-up call, make sure you spell out everything a user is getting prior to them filling out the form. They want to know what the reward is before they hand over their contact info.

Keep quality score in mind along with user experience. Make sure you include keywords on your page to help improve your PPC quality score but also consider load time. Page load time is also a factor in quality score, and you have roughly 3 seconds – any longer and your quality score is likely being impacted. Avoid using flash animation, which can increase your load time and result in usability issues for some users.

Allow people another place to go from there. Include a logo that links to your homepage or other deep links within your site. A visitor may not be ready to commit yet but are still interested – give them an option to learn more about your products or company.

Try different messages, images, layouts and colors to find a combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. You may be surprised what a few simple adjustments can do for the performance of your PPC campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

If you’ve been burned by poorly managed broad match keywords in the past, Google just released the Broad Match Modifier in the U.S. According to George Michie from RKG blog. With BMM you can use a + sign in front of words within Broad Match to trigger close variations of that word: misspellings, singular/plural, stemming, and acronyms/abbreviations. In short, BMM lets you create keywords, which have greater reach than phrase match and increased control on broad match. Thanks Google, you’ve done it again.

Darwin wrote about survival of the fittest. With the release of new apps and add-ons to our browsers, consumers are fighting back against an overload of ads. Most notable, Apple released Safari 5 witch has a new “reader” feature that take out text and content ads in an effort to make its browser more user friendly. Check out Michael Gray’s post about fighting back against these new features.

Giving your ads a local feel can help you increase a consumer’s comfort level. You might be asking, how do I separate myself from being the Walmart of widgets and still reach a large audience? Joseph Vivolo offers some tips to give your ads that mom and pop shop feel while still marketing to the whole country.

Are you starting to get nervous about the impending merge of Microsoft and Yahoo AdCenters? We all are. It can be tough to weed through all the information that is (and isn’t) available. For those of us utilizing these search engines for advertising, we want as much info as possible to make the shift seamless. The Folks at PPC Blog have found a rose in the weeds in their article about Yahoo’s Trademark Policies winning through.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Would you like some extra cash? Do you have a website or blog, or at least an idea for one? Do you have time to commit to updating that site with content?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, then you may want to consider becoming an affiliate advertiser.

Affiliate advertisers host ads for other companies’ products or services on their site. They are paid each time a particular action is taken relevant to one of the ads. For example, they may be paid each time someone sees the ad, each time someone clicks on the ad, or each time someone clicks on the ad and completes a conversion.

Revenues for affiliate advertising can range from a couple of cents per action to a couple hundred dollars per action. It depends on the value of the product or service for sale, as well as the particular affiliate program the company has in place.

Affiliate advertisers don’t need to be companies themselves. They can be regular people with simple and inexpensive websites.

If you’ve decided you’d like to try out affiliate advertising, here are some steps for getting started:

1. If you don’t already have a website or blog, start one. This is a necessary step for becoming an affiliate advertiser. Some affiliate programs, including Google’s AdSense program, require publishers in certain locations to have owned their sites for at least six months before becoming an affiliate. You may want to base the theme of your new site on a particular product or service you’d like to advertise, though a better idea is probably writing about a topic you’re passionate about. This way you’re more likely to update your content regularly, get more traffic, and have people click your ads.

1. Look for products and/or services to advertise. If you are new to affiliate advertising, you may want to start out with just one advertisement on your site. This way you can see if the revenue produced by the ad is worth the time you’ve invested in designing and updating your site for that ad’s success. You can search for products or services to advertise by joining an established affiliate network like Commission Junction, Amazon, eBay, ClickBank, or Google. Look for items that are highly relevant to your site, don’t have a lot of competition, and have a commission structure that fits your liking.

1. Once you’ve found the product or service you’d like to advertise, review your site. Make sure that it is relevant enough to what you’d like to promote. If it’s not, users will be less interested in the ad. If they are visiting your site to read about innovative children’s toys, for example, they likely won’t click on an ad for an office cleaning business. If your site’s theme is very different from the product or service you’d like to promote, find a new product or service. If it’s just a little different, modify your site to make it more relevant. That may include adding particular keywords, rewriting your headlines, and renaming your images. Once you’ve made these improvements, you’re more likely to be approved to advertise the particular product or service.

1. Next, apply for the affiliate program you’re interested in. Also, if required apply for the particular advertising program you’re interested in. Before applying, check out the affiliate program’s website to see if you fit the eligibility requirements. You will see that to be an affiliate advertiser for Amazon products, for example, you can’t be a resident of Colorado, North Carolina, or Rhode Island. Also, make sure that you have your bank account or PayPal information on hand, as many of the networks require this information in your application.

1. Once you’re accepted into an affiliate/advertising program, create your ad. Affiliate networks generally provide tools that let you easily design your ad. Usually you can choose between a simple text ad or a banner image ad. Some affiliate networks, like Google’s, allow for video, flash and mobile ads. You must make sure that the ad conforms to the affiliate and/or advertiser’s standards. eBay, for example, has special wording guidelines. Once your ad is complete, you will be provided with a code you must copy and paste onto your site. This code will make the ad appear, as well as track all traffic that is delivered from your site to a company’s landing page.

1. Monitor your ad and site analytics once the ad is up and running. See how much traffic your site or blog is generating, and how much of that traffic is clicking on your ad. Also, monitor the percentage of clicks that are resulting in conversions. Conversions can either be lead-related actions, like white paper registrations or newsletter signups, or actual sales. If your traffic numbers are pretty low, then improving those figures should be your number one priority. Perhaps you could update your blog more often, or start promoting your articles on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

1. If your traffic is high but your clicks are low, improve your ad. This could mean changing the ad type (banners instead of buttons, text instead of images), moving the ad to another location on your page, or simplifying the ad’s copy. Google offers a number of tips for improving your ad’s performance. Try to make just one change, and then see how that impacts your ad campaign. If it doesn’t make a positive difference, make a different change. Once you find the change or changes that work best, keep those in place. If none of your efforts improve your ad’s performance, you should consider picking a new product or service to advertise.

1. Once you’re ready, put more ads on your site. Once you’ve gotten a feel for whether affiliate advertising is worth your time, consider branching out. Find more products or services to promote within your affiliate program, or join additional affiliate programs to potentially maximize your revenue. Make sure, though, your new ads conform to your site’s theme. As you experience more success with your affiliate advertising efforts, buzz may generate about your site. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself being contacted by companies wanting to advertise on your site.

About the Author

Christine Laubenstein is a Marketing Associate at WordStream, a provider of an advanced pay-per-click tool suite, designed to improve the performance of pay-per-click keywords in your AdWords campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Back in the day when people had something to sell, they traveled door to door with their products. Before they sold anything, they first had to find an audience. Nowadays, users generate ad content based on their search words. As a copywriter, the challenge is not creating the opportunity to sell, but crafting a winning ad in a competitive environment. Giovanna over at PPC Blog describes some copywriting tips that will help you get started down the road to conversions.

Seasons come and go and so do peoples interest. You’re probably not going to get a lot of searches for wool sweaters in July and if you’re like me, you can never get enough data about your ads. Pinpointing the most relevant search terms can be valuable. Here are some great keyword tracking tools from Google that the folks at PPC Blog point out.

Kim Farmer at Microsoft introduces us to the SEM Advanced Series with an article on Budget Optimization. Should you be using the “spend budget until depleted” option with Microsoft adCenter? It wouldn’t hurt to consider it. Kim shows us what to keep an eye on, what reports to run, and how to set up your campaign for ideal results using this option.

By now you’ve heard that Lebron James is making his way to Miami. The quest for Lebron has taught a valuable PPC lesson. As Christopher Heine reports, the New York Knicks now know to double check their landing pages. But wait, the Lebronathon has more to offer! As a bonus article, check out the folks at This Week in Relevance’s article on relevancy and accuracy of your ads and make sure you aren’t peddling outdated products or discounts that might drive you CPC or CPL up.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Earlier this week, some of you noticed that I went after a blogger who was stealing content from the Marketing Technology Blog. At times, this happens as someone gets excited and decides that they’re doing me a favor by extending my audience. Not the case. This joker even published the post out onto a third-party site with his own name as the author. Not acceptable.

This guy posted the stolen post on his blogger blog. That wasn’t smart, since Blogger does comply with Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notes. I filled out Blogger’s form and received notice today that they had removed the stolen content.

I am very appreciative of Blogger’s support on this!

How to Prepare for Getting Your Content Stolen

It’s important to note that I purposely leave a breadcrumb trail in my blog posts. Very seldom do these thieves rewrite or copy the content and paste it. Instead, they write algorithms and grab your RSS feed and simply push it out to their blog. Most of the time this happens, the blogger isn’t aware. I am. One of the reasons I developed the PostPost plugin was so that I could edit and add content to my footer. Every post on my RSS feed has some sort of link back to my blog.

Next, I set up Google Alerts with my domain as the search term (as well as some others I can’t tell you about). Now – each time someone links to my blog, I get an email alert with a chunk of the post. It’s instantly recognizable when I read my content in the body of the alert.

Go to war

Perhaps one of the sneakiest things I do is that I instantly purchase images from iStockPhoto for all of my posts for the next week or so. Since I pay for the photos, it’s legal for me to use them but no one else. If you’re stupid enough to be stealing my content, you’re probably publishing these purchased images as well. Now I have a major corporation hellbent on fighting copyright theft on my side. As soon as I see the posts published, I contact support through iStockPhoto and report each of the posts, the images, their source and that they were stolen.

To be honest, I’m not sure if iStockPhoto has pursued any of the cases… all of them have taken down the posts when I’ve found them and told them. There’s still some guilty little pleasure in it for me, though. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of a copyright suit with iStockPhoto. They’ve got deep pockets and a lot of lawyers.

Tell their Friends

I’m not quiet about it. I do a Whois.net lookup to identify the hosting company and the person who owns the site. I’ll try to contact the person directly at first. Then the emails go out to the hosting company, tweets get angrier, and Facebook Wall messages get posted. I won’t stop until I begin to get responses back.

As I said before, I’ve never had to go beyond this point. There’s always the chance that someone will steal my content and be offshore, hidden, and virtually impossible to chase. I’ll do my best to report them to the search engines at that point, but I will NOT let them get away with it. You shouldn’t either!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Like many of you, I enjoyed a quintessential summer weekend during this past 4^th of July holiday. I feel like I did almost everything people enjoy doing on warm summer days. My activities included spending time at the pool, eating lunch in the park, visiting a zoo (the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago is absolutely wonderful), watching World Cup games, and grilling out with some friends just before topping off the weekend with a traditional Indianapolis fireworks display.

All in all, I am happy to say it was a pretty nice holiday weekend. However, you may have noticed that most technology-related activities were clearly absent from my weekend itinerary. Sure, tech geeks like me do not venture too far without being equipped with a smart phone and any number of handy apps. Nevertheless, with exception to some quick Twitter updates, email checks, and text messages, I was pretty vacant from my connected, online lifestyle. Instead of spending hours of my day searching Google, monitoring PPC accounts, and being logged into Facebook and Digg, I took the weekend to relax and enjoy some time with my long forgotten friend – the sun.

In fact, after realizing this void of technology pervasiveness, I remembered many of my officemates were going to be unavailable this weekend detached from both email and cell phone. Thus, my conclusion to this revelation: The only thing able to hold its own and fight for attention against the Web and digital technology might be a beautiful summer’s day.

So, in light of this discovery, I guess my question to you is: Are you appropriately adjusting and optimizing your PPC accounts for the summer months? At the end of May, Microsoft’s AdCenter Blog had a great article that introduced 10 Summer PPC Tips. Now being the beginning of July, I’d like to follow-up on their article by both elaborating on some of their points and introducing some new insights of my own.

World Cup

Ah, the thrills of the beautiful game. With only four games left, the bulk of the World Cup is pretty much over, but since the semi-finals are airing this week, I believe this worldwide event is still very relevant to talk about. So, how much does a game of soccer really impact economic and sales productivity?

It is said that each World Cup match has an average of 95 million viewers. Estimates conclude that 10 minutes of productivity will be lost a day for American businesses and unfortunately for companies (and in return, your PPC campaigns), 121.7 million dollars will be lost in the USA alone. Let me remind you that the United States is a country that ultimately has little interest in the world’s game. Our friend’s in the United Kingdom will see about 7.36 billion dollars lost in productivity if British workers view games for only an hour a day.

Now, I don’t believe I’m going out on too much of a limb here if I say that when people are so invested in a soccer match to not work, then they probably are not too interested in viewing your PPC ads either.

How to adjust:

• Try and make your keywords relevant to soccer, the World Cup tournament, and to the current matches.

• Focus ads towards those male and female sport fanatics, but also to those female fans that are tired of the constant World Cup attention (my girlfriend being one of them).

• Know what time the games are airing live and adjust your bidding accordingly with day parting. Search volume will be down during live play, but search traffic will peak with people looking for commentary and video before, at halftime, and after the game.

Summer-ize your ads and landing pages

You have perfected your ads and landing pages. They are reliable for clicks and leads, but maybe you have noticed those ads performing less than desired during the beginning of this summer.

Remember that during the summer, not only are people spending more time outdoors and away from their computers due to longer days, but also, sunlight and warm days draws out a different mindset in your regular audience.

How to adjust:

• Make your ads and landing pages relevant to the summer, utilizing summer themes and colors.

• Do your ads and landing pages express the summer mindset? Relaxation, vacation, warmth, and sunshine are words that catch the eyes of an audience with the summer sun on their minds.

• Make your ad benefits summer-related. Deals, savings, and specials should read hot deals, scorching savings, and summer specials.

• With longer days, people are spending more time outside and offline. Adjust day parting to avoid showing ads on particularly nice evenings and weekends.

What is coming next this summer season?

Independence Day and the fireworks have come and gone, but there are plenty of other summer events to focus your PPC ads on. Try to stay one step ahead of the season and offer your company or client to new markets by expanding on your seasonal keywords.

How to adjust:

• Be creative and topical with your summer ads. Make sure to stay fresh and keep ahead of what is on the mind of your summer audience.

• Up next: Back to school as well as Labor Day festivities, which include family gatherings and cookouts.

Don’t Act Until Certain

Summers can have a tendency to throw some curveballs into your PPC campaign trends; so don’t let the dips in performance panic you too much. Obviously, keep a watchful eye, make some minor adjustments for the summer months, and make sure to continue meeting your campaign goals, but try not to make any major changes without knowing for certain that those changes need to be made.

In the summer, weather, sporting events, and the overall psyche of potential customers can have a significant impact on ad and keyword performance. My advice, make sure to relax yourself this summer. Try to be clever with ad and landing page copy and innovative with your campaign strategy.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.