Renegade Search

With all the buzz going around about the new up and coming search engine, Cuil (pronouced "cool") we obviously had to kick the tires a bit to see how this bad boy would drive. As CNN reports, Cuil was created by ex-Google engineers, and who better in the business to drive the technology behind a search engine than those that helped to create the current market share leader.

While Cuil claims that the advantage of the new search engine over other engines like Google is that the results will be displayed and ordered based on the content of the site more so than the quality of the site and the links pointing to it, it also appears that they took a stab at a new visual layout as well. Unlike search engines that have come before it, Cuil definitely has a different way of showing results with the top 3 (or 1, 4 and 7 in the search results - it doesn't really say) results spanning the first row of the results with the rest down below. On smaller monitors, this definitely gives a much larger advantage to those that appear in that first row.

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Check out our friend Jeff Hudson as the guest star on this week's episode of PPC Rockstars. There are some great PPC tips on this episode like using Speed PPC, building effective campaigns from scratch, and much more so make sure you give it a good listen.

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How fast does your website load? You can test out your pages with this web page speed test tool.

There has been a lot of attention on page load speed lately. There used to be more focus on page load speed back when everybody was on 56k modems, but it seems a lot of the best practices from those days have gone out the window since high speed internet came along. I'd like to remind people that it's still important to optimize the speed of your pages. It can affect how much traffic your site receives, how many vistors stay on your site after you get them there and the bottom line...how much money your site makes. This is especially true for ecommerce sites that naturally get more browsing and page views per visitor.

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When creating a commercial website there is an idea that is central to core sensibilities of the business model. That is, usually, at root, how does this site make money? In many cases, when creating a site, a business was preexisting, while other times a business model is based on what new marketing models can offer - web traffic. Neither case is a bad model in and of itself, and likewise, neither approach guarantees success. More to the point though, nothing can guarantee success, but there are ways to get a leg up on competition and to better position a website for success.

First there are keywords. In the web world, and as I've said before, this is the cornerstone of the search game. Fine and dandy. But what happens with keywords? They can't just be stuffed into content and layered transparently in an attempt to game search engines. They can't just be placed anywhere any longer. In PPC you can bid on them, but even Yahoo has tried to deny random bidding strategies by implementing a minimum CPC for a site to advertise for certain keywords based on relevence. Google has been doing so for some time.

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Finding the proper keywords is the cornerstone of any successful SEM campaign. I imagine every PPC manager out there begins a campaign with keyword research in order to find what keywords are going to generate the desired traffic to a website. This will typically include picking basic, generic keywords and finding similar search queries which will provide the basis for an extended, or long tail, keyword universe.

While gathering these initial nuts and bolts of a campaign negative keywords will also be identified, ensuring ads will not show if certain keywords are added to the query. Some of these negative keywords will be obvious, while others can be surprising as there are now so many unique industries and websites catering to niche markets. This type of research is invaluable since it is impossible to know a priori every possible query that could trigger an ad that, if clicked, will cost money resulting in no ROI. (Of course negative keywords are only valuable in a campaign if broad or phrase match terms are used - though that discussion will have to wait for a future post.)

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