Archive for September, 2008

I just went thru an invoicing hell with a whole bunch of past-due invoices from Google. This was across several different accounts, that are contained within 2 MCC accounts. I was dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and the invoices were not addressed in the way to comply. As a side note, Sarbanes Oxley Compliance, “has increased costs associated with being a publicly held company by 130 percent.”

In this particular case, since they didn’t have specific “Bill To” information on the invoices, the invoices got stuck in the SOX process, and hadn’t been paid. Eventually, chargebacking was involved in a few cases just to get the invoices paid.

Alas, everything is resolved now. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But, thank G-d it’s resolved. Certainly at the very least, this was an interesting learning experience.

Here’s a short but sweet post that should save you time, and increase your productivity so you don’t have to go thru that same unpleasant experience I did.

Steps before you start the campaign:
Step 1: Make sure you have all the necessary approval(s).
Step 2: Remember to get PO#’s before each campaign, to be applied to each invoice/campaign.
Step 3: Make sure the account/invoices will have the correct “Bill To” information.
Step 4: Submit invoices as they are generated by Google. Google won’t necessarily have the invoice ready at the end of each month.

For those of you that manage a Google MCC Account, there’s no need to click into every single account to generate a monthly invoice. Depending on the amount of accounts you manage, this exercise could take quite a long time.

So, here’s an easier method to grab all of your monthly invoices, broken out by specific accounts.

GENERATING INVOICES:
1) Log into your MCC.
2) Click on “My Account” tab.
3) Use dropdown to select Date Range.
4) The Billing Summary will appear on the next screen sorted by Month/year.

On that screen you are given several hyperlinks from which you can grab information. The choices are consolidated (.pdf) | spreadsheet | account-level (.zip) .

I prefer to use the account-level (.zip) which contains every invoice by account for that month.

That’s it. Hopefully, this post has saved you time and energy whether you’re an SEO Consultant, Agency person, or on the client-side.

In developing the new Shinedown website, we’ve used a traditional text link with href in the code. But it’s being rendered on the end users browser as an image by the CSS style applied that makes it look and feel like an image. (See screenshot below of the style definition.)

Click image for a larger size.

The screenshot includes the source code & formatting.

The result is that the search engine spider sees text, and the user sees pretty images. Text navigation is preferred for SEO purposes. However, sometimes the design team is determined to use pretty looking images. So, here is a solution that is the best of both worlds.

Additionally, if you go to the Shinedown site, you’ll notice that there is Text navigation on the bottom of the page. It helps with the crawl, works as as a mini-sitemap, and good for website usability.

Related Posts:
Best Navigation for SEO
Scrolling beyond the Footer Navigation

An SEO Consultant needs to eat properly. So, once in awhile I publish a recipe. This time it’s on dessert. Believe it or not, this recipe is healthy. It’s because of the whole wheat that provides Fiber & protein.

Every couple of weeks my wife make this amazing chocolate chip cookie cake. It tastes like soft chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven. I can’t rave about this enough. Suffice it to say, if you like chocolate chip cookies, then you’re gonna flip over this recipe.

The photo is a picture of the last slice left. We bascially devour this thing over the weekend. Children, neighbors, and anyone else that catches sight of it, usually want a slice. The real secret is in the amount of chocolate chips used. Use alot. It makes a difference.

1 cup canola or safflower oil
1 cup sugar
.5 cup brown sugar packed firmly
2 eggs
2 and 1/3 cup of whole wheat flour
1 cup oatmeal
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp of vanilla extract
2 cups chocolate chips (semi-sweet)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Blend together oil, sugars, eggs, and vanilla until creamy.
Combine flour oatmeal, salt, baking soda, and add to creamed mixture.
Stir in chocolate chips .
Pour into a 9 inch round cake pan.

Bake until desired doneness. Bake from 15 to 20 minutes . Use a toothpick to test.

Related Posts:
Gourmet Meatloaf for Hungry SEO’s.
Dairy Kugel recipe for Hungry SEO’s.
Spicy Chili Recipe for Hungry SEO’s.

Start off by downloading a Keyword Report for a previous Time Period out of Adwords report center. Sort by your specific success metric (eg: Cost-Per-Coversion, Orders, etc.).

Create a new Adwords campaign using the Google Buildout Spreadsheet (Excel). This new campaign will replace the pre-existing campaign.

1. Only use the keywords that converted from the previous time period. This is effectively cutting away all the excessive “no results” keyword spending.
2. Bucket the keywords into tight-knit adgroups.
3. Write fresh ad copy for all the adgroups. Write two ads per adgroup so you can a/b split test ads, and conduct an ad optimization.
4. Customize the Display URL’s to contain the keyword representative for that adgroup (eg: www.mysite.com/keyword).
5. Keep the CPC’s the same to launch with. After launch conduct daily bid mgmt.
6. Use multiple Destination URL’s. This is for testing purposes.

After you get client approval, upload the spreadsheet using Adwords Editor. Once the campaign is live here are some things to do for every adgroup in the Adwords account:

1. Pause underperforming keywords that are bleeding the account without converting.
2. Reduce bids into lower positions for keywords that have a high cost per conversion.
3. Add more keywords to select adgroups.
4. Change some Keyword Matching Options.
5. After you get a little more data in the account, conduct an Ad Optimization.

It’s ideal to use a significant amount of data to make additional changes. Typically 50-100 clicks per converting term, or another metric to watch like a threshold for Cost-Per-Conversion.