I have a Facebook profile, a Twitter feed, a LinkedIn profile and a bunch of other social media networks that I use less frequently. In addition, our company has pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ll admit that keeping up with all of these feeds – posting, reading, replying, comprehending. figuring out how to not look like an idiot – is overwhelming and sometimes a pain in the butt.Then to make the situation even more complicated, Google launches Google+. Now I’m really in a quandary. Typically, I check Facebook, then Twitter, and finally LinkedIn. I read and if I see something interesting I Like, Comment, Share, RT, or DM. During the day, if I see an article that I like I’ll Tweet it to my massive number of followers .

With my Google+ I feel like I have one more (maybe one too many) social network to read and update. The result is that I’m getting a headache and my butt is hurting even more.

I try to automate a few of the connection so that I don’t have to updated each site manually. I decided about a year ago to use Twitter as my main launch pad and automate my Tweets to Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes this easy – all you have to do is add your Twitter particulars to your LinkedIn profile – done. Making a connection from Twitter to Facebook is relatively easy using www.dlvr.it. I also automated posts from our blog to be delivered to my Twitter account. All of this seems to work well.

With my new Google+ account I thought that I would just add it to my dlvr.it account and send those posts to Twitter which would also updated Facebook and LinkedIn. No such luck. Apparently the API for Google+ is not available. This was a few weeks ago. Today I thought I would do a little research (on Google) and see if anyone had figured out a work-around solution.

The answer is Yes. There is an excellent post on dlvr.it’s own blog called Connect Google+ to Twitter and Facebook. I did have trouble finding my Google+ user id but found the answer here: How Do I Find My Google Plus User ID? [Google+].

I haven’t had time to test all of these connections, so good luck if you try it.

Enjoy!

This infographic, quite literally, has many of the tricks for search on Google that I use on a daily basis:

• Site:
• Intitle:
• Define:
• Calculator
• Keyboard shortcuts (I love those)
• Ctrl-L (in the infographic they use Command which is for Mac users)

Enjoy.

Pretty unexpected and awesome.

This incident, however, was unusual in a couple of ways. First of all, the form had been completely filled out. Typically, the contact person will fill out a few sections like the required fields and that is it – they hit Submit and send their information to us hoping we will call back. But this form had every single field filled out in detail – including a list of competitors.

But there is more!

The email address of the contact person ended in @dell.com. As I mentioned the Contact Us form on our website is filled out often but, sadly, not very often by a company the size of Dell. I’ll admit my first reaction was disbelief. To give you an idea of how large Dell is, it ranks 41 on the Fortune 500 list. Revenues are $61 billion. To give you some perspective Google ranks 92 on the Fortune 500 and has revenues of $29 billion. I suspected that this was a hoax or someone playing a joke on us. In fact, we were originally contacted in April so this could have been an April Fool’s joke.

But it wasn’t.

I called Jeff H and asked him how we could help out. He said that he was responsible for sales to small and medium sized business in the United States. He mentioned that they spend a lot on paid ads on search engines which made sense because I see their ads all the time on Google. They weren’t looking to reduce there budget but they did want to increase the profile of their website pages on the natural or organic side of the search engines.

I mentioned a  few of the advantages of search engine optimization (SEO) which Jeff H seemed to appreciate. The list below is similar to what I told him:

1) Free Targeted Traffic
The primary advantage of SEO over any other type of internet marketing is found is that once your website is listed on the first page of results for your keyword phrases, you get clicks to your site for FREE. This means that you can receive traffic from prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year at no cost. And here’s the kicker – they are looking for the products and services that your company has to offer! Wow – that is beautiful.

On Google.com search for “business laptops”. Dell.com should be on the first page – probably at the top of the page.

2) Excellent ROI
A return on investment is one of the major advantages of SEO. It may take a few months for your website to rank well for the targeted keywords but once ranked, the ROI is excellent because you are getting free traffic to your website. Nice!

I can’t say how much Dell paid for our services but they have re-cooped their investment many times over.

3) Cost Effective
SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing. The initial work of keyword research, optimizing pages, and improving inbound links takes some effort and investment. But if the site is powerful (read lots of high quality inbound links) and properly optimized then the rankings on search engines should stay in place for months and sometimes years. Brilliant!

We optimized this page http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops a few years ago and it is still working very well for Dell.

4) Increased Brand Visibility
SEO leads to the increased brand visibility for your website. Your business will start showing for strategically important keywords, and more and more visitors will be there to look for the services you are providing via your website.

You can try a variety of other keyword phrases and Dell.com is on the first page of results. Try: “business computers“, “servers“, and “workstations”.

5) Credibility
Your company will get a boost in credibility and reputation because the search engines are ranking your website highly for specific keywords related to your industry.

The end result for Dell was free visitors, excellent ROI, at a low cost, with increased visibility on a variety of keywords and excellent credibility. The screen capture below was taken today. Dell is still ranking well for “business laptops” and beating out over 34 million other web pages.

I panicked, thinking I had accidentally changed the geo-target settings in Google AdWords. After assuring that this was not the case, I started looking into what could possibly be causing this.

Let me set the stage a little bit here:

Client – Lethbridge College

Geo-Target – Most of Canada

I looked at the Google Analytics reports and sure enough, just over 100 visits from the Philippines and close to 200 from the USA. Why on earth is this happening?

I dug around a little bit more but couldn’t find anything so I did the only thing I could think of: call Google! I spoke to a very friendly individual who put me on hold while he investigated. A few moments later, he came back on the phone and assured me that all the settings were fine. This is happening because Google doesn’t only use a users IP address to serve ads. WHAT? Apparently, the IP address is used but so are geo-specific terms such as ‘Calgary’ or ‘Lethbridge’. So I dug a bit deeper into the Analytics data. Sure enough, the keywords indicated searches like “Lethbridge College” or “college in Lethbridge”.

This case is a little out of the ordinary because the ‘business name’ has the city name in it. Normally, when a business name is something like, for example, Anduro, these searches would not generally result in ads showing for “internet marketing” in Europe, when we are targeting Canada.

I wanted to take it one step further. Why would they want to pay for these people to click on the ads? Interestingly enough, a lot of these clicks resulted in conversions. This tells me that someone in the Philippines is looking to come to Canada to go to college/university and found Lethbridge College as a result.

That’s good but is it worth it? Turns out it is! The cost/conversion in the Philippines is 72.5% LOWER than in Canada. That is incredible.

Granted, there are a lot less clicks and a lot less conversions but there is no need to panic over the ads showing in different countries.

The Google rep also told me that they are working on implementing a setting that allows advertisers to turn this off. Now that I have been looking into it some more, I am not sure I would. The cost/conversion is so much lower – why not advertise there? In this case, it works out but in the future, I will really need to think about whether or not it makes sense to advertise elsewhere.

For a local painting company – not so much. But a school catering to a vast number of people? Absolutely.

But it is good to know that the Google car has enough guts to escape ruffians like this when they are mapping the rough part of Norway.

Puzzled, I called Ian McAnerin, www.mcanerin.com, to see if he had any ideas as to why this was happening. He thought that one option may be that Google was pulling the title from our listing on www.dmoz.org. Sure enough the listing on DMOZ has our legal name of Anduro Technologies Inc.

As an experiment, I sent in a request for a name change to DMOZ. Once they change the name we can compare this results on Google and see if that is the reason.

It took me a while and $20 but I was able to figure out a solution. One key step was finding and using www.justanswer.com. Brilliant service. I typed in my question. Identified that I would pay $20 for an answer. Sent out the request. In about 10 min a techie guy replied. It took a few attempts but he figured it out.

1. Log into your gmail account

2. Click on Settings then Labs

3. Search for Signature Tweaks and enable

That’s it. Now when I reply using Gmail, my signature is at the end of my reply and not at the end of the entire message.

Interestingly, I now have a little green bottle right near the link to Settings, identifying that I’m using Google Labs.

This article is about Google Product extensions which are putting an end to the 70-character ad text which is incredibly restricting, the ‘one landing page per keyword’ rule and the fact that image ads are not available on the search network.

Amazing! Unfortunately, this product is only available in the U.S. for the time being but I am sure Google will roll it out world wide once all the bugs have been dealt with.

So, what exactly are Google Extensions? Simple! Instead of simply one ad being displayed for a company/product, the ad appears with a + sign inside of a box underneath it which can be expanded and displays a list of other products featured by this same company. Brilliant!

Where does this extra information come from? The company needs to enter information into Google’s Merchant Center and the information is pulled from there. If a customer then clicks on one of the products listed in the expanded product extension, they are taken to the appropriate page (specified in the Google Merchant Center).

The article goes into great detail about the strategies, costs involved, tracking and whether there will be an impact on SEO (since once all of the extensions are expanded, the first organic listing falls well below the fold) but for sake of simplicity, I have just covered the basics.

Check out the full article here (with a subscription), on Google or contact us at Anduro for more information on this. Remember though, this is only available in the U.S. for the time being.

There are many reports available to the AdWords advertiser – some helpful, some just a lot of data on a page with no real value. One of the helpful ones is called the Search Query report. This report spits back, essentially, a list of keywords users have used and have seen your ads. The reason this is helpful is if you are using different match types (which I hope you are!) there are a lot of variations of keywords that you may or may not have included making this list incredibly helpful. You can also see which words your ads showed up for that you may not want to show for and you can then add these words as negative keywords.

A big one I have been seeing a lot is a local company selling their product only in that particular city, with the geo target set to that city. So for example, if I have a jewelry store in Calgary and I am only interested in local customers, I can set the target to Calgary only. But if someone in Calgary searches for ‘jewelry store in vancouver’ my ad will show up if one of my keywords is phrase match ‘jewelry store’. This will show up in the report and I can add vancouver as a negative keyword.

On the flip side of that, maybe someone typed in ‘calgary jewelry store’ and my ad would have shown. If I have broad match terms, I could add calgary jewelry store as a phrase match term and slowly eliminate the need for broad match terms which often have high impressions and show the ads for some pretty interesting combinations of words! They are also very good at using up your budget quickly.

When you run the search query report, you can specify which campaign or adgroups you want to run the report on.

With this new feature, you can log in to your account and while you are looking at each adgroups keywords, click the “See Search Terms” link and it will show you all of the keywords used for that particular adgroup. This is so much easier than running the report every time and then having to sort by adgroup etc.

The real time saver though, is the fact that you can add keywords right there. With a click of the mouse! You can also add negative keywords just as easily.



You can either select specific keywords and see what variations users have used or you can simply click on See search terms… and then select All. This will give you a complete list.

Fantastic tool that has already saved me a ton of time! Give it a shot and let me know what you think!