Jason+: A Blog about WordThink

If you are an AdWords advertiser, you may quickly realize that "riches are in the niches," meaning that if you find really wonderful, relevant keywords that match what you sell with what customers want, these will generate high click thru rates, high conversion rates, and ultimately high sales. Yippie!!!!!! However, Daddy Google has some bad news for you: minimum bids. You can have a wonderful, highly relevant ad on a wonderful, highly relevant keyword with all your "quality score" ducks in a row in terms of Google... In fact, you might be the ONLY advertiser on that keyword, and have a click thru rate upwards of 10%, and yet Minimum Bids Google will automatically set the minimum bid for a keyword to some pretty high numbers. I have seen upwards of $20.00 for the CPC on bids for which everything is in alignment, and the quality score is fantastic... YET.... Clearly "behind the scenes" Google has some algorithm to cost you A LOT of money th...

Google : Penalize sites that promote apps. Apple : Encourage growth of apps to overwhelm the open Web Us : Caught in the middles Says the New York Times -  That situation has been made even harder by some recent moves by Apple and Google. Last month, Apple enabled ads to be blocked on mobile websites on iPhones and iPads, which threatened to hurt publishers that relied on such ads for revenue. And next month, Google will start penalizing websites that use pop-up screens to promote their apps by placing them lower in search engine results, a move that some have called “app blocking.”   http://goo.gl/uIvRe1

Search Engine Land found something quite funny: Google has a hiring post out that it's looking to hire an "SEO expert."  Ha, ha, ha. This has been picked up by the media, ironically, as if Google doesn't understand its own algorithm, and need someone to "game the system" to get to the top of Google. Read the Google SEO Job Posting You can read it -   Search Engine Land: Google Is Hiring An SEO Manager To Improve Its Rankings In Google ( http://goo.gl/Cj0O1y ) Program Manager, Search Engine Optimization (official Google job posting) ( https://goo.gl/3mtFLB ). Google (Still) Believes in Technical SEO! Humor, aside, if you read the job posting it tells you some interesting things about Google, or at least about the mindset about the person who brainstormed the job offer. First and foremost, the job offer is all about "technical SEO." Despite what Google has been telling the world (for years now), that you "just need to write good ...

Today's New York Times has a very provocative article about a study conducted by Tim Wu of Columbia University on local search results. Essentially, Wu presented people with local search results in two ways -  With the Google+ "snack pack" of local search results Without these results, showing the older "traditional" search results, excluding the "snack pack" of local. According to Wu and the study (financed by Google competitor Yelp ), consumers strongly preferred the second set of results. Essentially the study argues that Google is systematically giving preferences to Google+ local results OVER the "better" Google organic results. Yelp also financed an infomercial website called Focus on the User and a YouTube video explaining it.  All of this argues that Google is using its monopoly search power to give preference to its own local system, Google+ Local (now renamed Google My Business ) over Yelp's competitive local system...

It's late Friday afternoon, and I'm checking in on my Feedly . Feedly is one of my favorite news aggregators, and I came across ' Through the Google Lense ,' which is an official column by Google on trends in search queries. Through the Google Lense  is pretty sad when you drill into it. Why? Because the tool its actually based on - Google Trends - is in and of itself a sad little tool. Google Trends gives you only the most basic access to search query trends on Google: you can compare two words to each other, but you can't really drill into words (phrases, synonyms, related words, etc.) and you can't really do much with the data, quantity or value of search terms. You can't really customize Google Trends to any significant degree.  So it's a more a temptation than a tool . Why is that? The reason, I submit to you - dear reader - is that Google is a monopoly, and like all monopolies, Google stifles innovation. If It Walks Like a Duck, It ...

Do you like takeout ?  Or as the Brits say "take-away?" Well, if you use Google services like Gmail, Google Docs, Hangouts, etc., Google has a semi-secret service called "Google Takeout." It will back up your data, and you can download it as a ZIP file. Very useful and nifty if you  a) get locked out of your Google account or hacked b) Google goes crazy and does even more nefarious things than usual with your so-called "private" data (privacy... how quaint). c) you want Microsoft-formats of your stuff. If you depend - as I do - on Google services, Takeout is a fabulous thing to know about.  (They don't do a great job promoting it, of course). Using Takeout to Backup your Google Files Log in to your Google account (just go to http://www.google.com/ ) and make sure you see your name / picture in the top right - or click on the blue LOGIN button on the top right. Go to Google Takeout by clicking on https://www.google.com/settings/takeo...

Today's New York Times has an article about the frustration of Wall Street with Google . Frustration? How can that be?  Google is a "cash cow," racking in dollar after dollar via AdWords. But there is reason for frustration - a lot - because beneath the surface, Google is actually doing a very poor job as a company . The company has one, and only one, serious source of revenue: AdWords. And that revenue largely comes from the desktop. Other Attempts to Make Money: Not Working Other attempts by Google are not making money.  My favorite to kick: Google Glass.  No money there, and really no real traction for those silly glasses.  Or self-driving cars. We aren't even close to the age of the Jettisons! But what really really irks me is Google Places !  First it was Google Local, and then it was Google Places, and then it was Google+ Local, and now it's Google My Business.  Google has a GOLDEN opportunity with local to compete with the likes of Yelp - f...

Google suggest is a lot of fun. Put in a few words, and look for funny (or sometimes NSWF) stuff.  There is even a website that tracks Google poetry.  I am working on a project in AdWords, looking for negative keywords, and here's what I found -  To find your own use keywordtool.io or check out Google poetics .

Have you advertised on Google's "Display Network?" If you have, and especially if you didn't know what you were doing, you may have been the victim of "Click Fraud."   The Bot Arms Race & Click Fraud on the Google Display Network Marketplace's David Weinberg reports -  Criminal rings have found a new target, one that is turning out to be very lucrative and less risky than bank and credit card fraud: digital ad fraud. Researchers believe that more than one third of all internet traffic is from bots--software programs, and not actual humans. And all those fake eyeballs are wreaking havoc on the $50 billion digital ad market. You can read, or listen to this important article, here .

Oh the SEO world is abuzz with Hummingbird hype . Allegedly, Google has made a major, incredible, catastrophic, complete overhaul of their (magical) algorithm. Many are freaking out, quite a few are concerned, and of course every serious Google-watcher like myself must pay attention. We've been through this before. Sometimes the hype is understated, as when Penguin rolled out and at first it did not seem like a big deal. Now it's clear Penguin is a very big deal with many severe penalties for naughty link-building. Panda, in contrast, doesn't seem to be nearly the problem. Hummingbird and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Hummingbird seems to be mainly about latent semantic indexing, which is a fancy word for: Google being smarter about what words go with what words, and thereby to infer meaning. So many words and phrases are ambiguous and only with "context" can a "machine" interpret what you truly mean. Moving to a more Siri-like user experie...

This is just a quick post about the infamous Google Keyword Planner tool. If you haven't heard, Google has killed the old keyword tool and replaced it with the Keyword Planner.  I have had nothing but a stream of questions, frustrations, and negative feedback from my students since it's launch. My video on the keyword planner explains how to use it, and I have just uploaded a completely up-to-date list of all known free keyword tools, many Google-based and many not. So I am doing my utmost to help people out who need keyword tools and are struggling with the new keyword planner. Let me know what you think!

Everyone who takes my classes on SEO understands that I am quite a proponent of SEO-friendly press releases using either a free service like PRLOG.org or a paid service like PRWEB.com (Vocus). Issuing frequent press releases can help your site climb to the top of Google in these ways: Fresh Content . Press releases create "fresh content" on your site, thereby signalling Google that your site is alive and well. It's akin to the sign on the door of a restaurant saying, "Here are today's specials!" Press releases and blog content create fresh, new content that tells Google (and humans) that you have new and exciting information to share. Inbound Links . In many cases, you can "embed" an "optimized link" into your press release, and many additional sites will run your press release exactly as it is written, including not using the "nofollow" attribute to Google... In SEO lingo, what this means is that many of your press releas...

Sometimes when I go to church... people have this funny phrase: their " Prayer Life ." What they mean is that they have an organized ritual of praying and being spiritual much as many of us have an organized ritual of going to the gym, or to Starbucks, or watching Mad Men . So by "Prayer Life," they mean a systematic rigorous method of connecting with God or being spiritual. Your Share Life Whatever your religious inclinations might be, you can learn from this idea. For example, what is your "Share life?" Sharing is huge on Social Media; no one can be an expert on everything. Most of us "share" cool stuff with our followers... But do we do this in a systematic way? I am an expert on SEO, for example, and on Social Media, but not on WordPress, not on taxes, not on politics, and not on pop culture. But I follow others on those topics, and I share myself on SEO, Social Media and AdWords. Having an Organized Share Life Each morning, ...