The benefits of Facebook advertising and how effective their ad targeting engine is. The Facebook ad platform lends itself to laser targeted campaigns through its use of the extensive Facebook demographic data.

Cetainly this ad below is my current best YouTube ad and is viral marketing at it’s best. Enjoy!

Oh and by the way, language warning, not suitable for work (NSFW).

Description: Rankings are the #1 priority in the search engines, but click through rate comes next. Make sure you are not making these critical mistakes to plummet your CTR.

Click through rate is an often-overlooked subject when it comes to search engine optimization. Of course, most people are concerned with their rankings, and rightfully so. But once you are on the first page, wouldn’t it be smart to get as many of those searchers to your site as possible? If you can do a couple simple things and avoid one critical mistake, you can significantly increase your click through rate and ultimately increase your bottom line.

Obviously, if you’re doing good on-page SEO to begin with, you’ve already taken three important steps to increase your CTR – that is, your keyword is in your title, URL, and your description. What happens when you do this is the keyword will go bold in all 3 instances. Test after test has revealed that bolding in search results increases CTR.

What else? Well, you should have a compelling headline in relation to your keyword. Basically, you want to try to get into the mind of the searcher. This should have been done when you were picking a target keyword and making sure that your offer fulfilled the needs of the searcher. So if your keyword is “weight loss tips,” a good headline may be, “7 Uncommon Weight Loss Tips To Shed Pounds Fast.” With the keyword, the intent is clear that they want to lose weight. The title is the first thing the searcher will see, and in a way, you are pre-selling them, so make it good. Also, make sure you capitalize each word in your title, which helps CTR.

Be just as compelling with the description. All you have to do though is elaborate on the title. BIG TIP: If you’re a local business, put your phone number in your description! (I’ll take 25% of the proceeds you get from this tip )

Okay, here’s the BIG mistake most webmasters make when it comes to CTR. Many titles have ellipses at the end of them (the dot dot dot…). This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. According to extensive testing, having ellipses in your title can decrease your CTR by a whopping 9%! I see this ALL THE TIME from websites that are ranking for enormous keywords. Of course, it’s not going to hurt your rankings, but imagine if you’re ranking #1 for a 50,000 searches a month term. Would you like to get 4,500 more visitors per month (for free, by making one small change)? Of course you would. The title space is 70 characters long for Google SERPS’s.

If you’re using the all-in-one SEO plugin for your blog, which automatically puts “the title of your article | the title of your homepage” and then uses ellipses if it’s too long, then all you have to do is make the title of your article take up the whole title space. No, your post title does not need to be 70 characters long. Just use the title and then put a bunch of spaces. Done.

It never ceases to amaze me how the smallest changes can provide the greatest results, in the SEO game.

Description: Anchor text obviously matters when it comes to rankings. But what is the best way to use it? This post seeks to uncover the truth.

In the SEO community, there’s an ongoing debate on how to use “anchor text” most effectively. However, it is generally accepted that using anchor text for your backlinks has a big influence on rankings. This article is going to talk about the debate and put forth what I think is the best strategy.

In case you don’t know what anchor text is… it’s the text that appears over a hyperlink. So in this example…

Search Engine Marketing Melbourne

…the words “Search Engine Marketing Melbourne” are the anchor text. The way you make this anchor text can depend on where you are placing your link and what kind of code that site accepts. Most of the time you will use html, but if you are placing a link on a forum, for example, you will use “BBCode”. When you’re ready to place a link, all you need to do is do a Google search for “anchor text html” or “anchor text BBCode” and you will find the appropriate way to place a link. It is quite easy.

When it comes to rankings, it is generally accepted that Google ranks pages higher for specific keywords when the link is using that keyword as the anchor text. For example, in the example above, it would be best to use the anchor text of “Search Engine Marketing Melbourne” to rank for the keyword, “Search Engine Marketing Melbourne.”

Having that in mind, you want to try to use anchor text as much as possible. Much of the controversy around anchor text has to do with what “looks natural” to Google. Because some say, when your actions don’t look natural to Google, then your actions look engineered and Google will penalize you. And the theory is that Google would rather rank your site on “organic popularity” instead of your hard work of placing links and marketing your site around the web.

If you ask me, the action of making anchor text is “unnatural” in itself. Especially if it’s coming from a page where the author or source needs to use html to make that happen. But I suppose Google does not think this way. In fact, they have an “operator” in their search engine, “allinanchor:” that will show the top results for the sites that have the term as their anchor text. They obviously value it. Furthermore, placing the keyword term as the anchor text often times makes no sense.

And when it comes to “varying” anchor text, clearly it looks more natural to not use the same keyword every time. But don’t vary it. Based on extensive testing in this area, Google has clearly encouraged webmasters to act “unnaturally” because using the same anchor text (your target keyword) on all your links is what is the most effective in terms of rankings.

Google’s algorithm is not as advanced as many give it credit to be. When you place varying anchor text, Google gets confused. Almost like they’re saying, “you don’t want to rank for that term? OK, down in the rankings you go.”

Long story short, place anchor text when you can and always use your target keyword for that page, every time.

Description: Are you unintentionally hurting your site by following an SEO myth? Find out if you need to stop doing what you’re doing.

A lot of people who are doing SEO are focusing on the wrong issues and are therefore wasting time and money on inefficient tactics. Additionally, some people are even doing things that are potentially harming their site’s rankings. Read this article so you know if you’re in the clear or not.

The very important topic of this article is: “Relevancy.” When I say relevancy, I mean in relation to where you place your backlinks. For example, are the sites where you place your backlinks in the same niche as your site? Let me explain to you with LOGIC how relevance makes absolutely no difference to how Google ranks your site.

First off, there is no evidence to support this claim. Extensive testing has been done on sites where relevance was completely ignored and it made no difference as to whether the site was ranked on the first page.

Another logical explanation to this is that there is no way Google can determine whether one site is relevant to another. Leslie Rhode, the mad SEO scientist from StomperNet, explains that there are simply too many synonyms and various meanings of words in the English language, creating too many possible combinations for computers to determine if sites are in the same niche. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.

Additionally, a great percentage of sites on the net are not focused on just one niche. For example, a news site or a bookmarking site might have categories for articles of every niche under the sun. So if you get a link from CNN (PR10) and your site is in weight loss, is it reasonable to assume the link will not be worth as much because CNN is in the “news” niche and your site is in the “weight loss” niche? Wouldn’t that be a mistake on the search engine’s part (if they were to mark it as not matching in relevance and give it less power) considering that CNN reports on “weight loss news” all the time?

So my point is, if you’re in the weight loss niche and you’re only trying to get links from other sites in the same niche, you’re wasting your time and money.

Additionally, you may actually be hurting your site by not diversifying the source of your backlinks enough. For example, if you’re in the adult entertainment niche, how many .edu and .gov backlinks are you going to be able to get in that niche? Not very many, I presume. So my advice is to drop this notion that relevance of the sites where you place backlinks matters AT ALL – because it doesn’t. Work on getting as much diversity to your links as possible for your best chance of success in SEO.

Description: This article breaks down the major factors of search engine optimization on Google. If you’re a beginner to SEO, you must read this article before you do anything else.

If you’re a beginner to SEO, this is the place to start. In this article, I’m going to explain everything you need to know to get started with SEO on your website.

SEO is broken down into two major components: “on-page” and “off-page” SEO.

The way I like to look at it, on-page SEO is the way you get your site into the game, so to speak. It’s how Google will know what keyword you want to rank your site for. They won’t always oblige, but the on-page elements will be your jumping off point and you need to tend to these factors correctly so that you give you site the best possible chance to make it onto the first page.

Before I get into the specific factors, I want to point out that you should target ONE KEYWORD per page of your site, whether that’s a home page or inner page. If you try to target more than one, you’ll confuse Google and your site may not rank. So if Google decides to rank your page for multiple keywords, consider it a bonus. If you intend for your site to rank for multiple keywords, then plan to make multiple pages and target individual keywords with the following principles in mind.

In on-page SEO, you will need to pay attention to the following factors:

1) Keyword in your title – you want to make sure it’s somewhere in there. It might be best if the title IS your keyword.

2) Keyword in the URL – again, just make sure it’s in there. If the keyword is an “exact match” URL, that is best. However, that is not a necessity to rank, whatsoever. Google probably only gives a small boost for this. The next best is to have http://example.com/keyword.

3) Keyword in the “description” – this is the part that comes up underneath your title tag in the search engines. It is super-important to Google because it is all about delivering relevant results.

4) Keyword in your “H1” header – In html coding, there is something known as headers, H1, H2, etc. Make sure your keyword is in the H1 tag and it’s best if your keyword IS the H1 tag.

5) Keyword used on page – Use it from 3-10% density. No reason to nitpick over this.

6) A note on meta keyword tags – they don’t matter. But put your keyword there anyway… why not?

So once you’ve figured out “on-page”, you need to start “off-page” (“backlinking”), which is an enormous topic on it’s own. Keep in mind, that you will not CONSISTENTLY rank for keywords without doing backlinking. It is considered to be 90% of SEO. I look at it like “reputation building.” Google judges the backlink quality, quantity, and methods of your site and from that, gauges how much people like your site. Ultimately, your “reputation” will determine how high you rank.

So my advice is to start with what I’ve given you and then learn all you can about backlinking. It really is the quickest path to higher rankings!

Of course the downside is that it can be quite time intensive to obtain high quality directory backlinks. The question remains, is it a worthwhile undertaking?

If you are trying to do the listings yourself, without any specialised software tools to make the submission process faster, then the answer is definitely no. Your time is far better spent promoting your site via other methods.

Of course if you have tools that allow for semi automated submissions then yes, directory submissions can provide a ranking boost. The quality of most backlinks is poor but in terms of link diversity they are useful. They will seldom create any direct traffic; they are purely to be used as a backlinking mechanism.

There are a couple of notable exceptions to this rule, specifically the Yahoo Directory (PR 9) and the DMOZ.org Directory (PR 8). The PR of these two is obviously huge but it is the SEO authority that they bring to your site that is their major benefit. Both of these directories are considered to be ranking factors in the Google algorithm and the benefit of their link is far greater than just their Page rank.

Of course to be listed in the Yahoo Directory currently costs $299 a year and there is no guarantee they will accept you. Probably not recommended for your one page Acai site!

DMOZ.org on the other hand is a free directory but they have a rigorous approval process (read SLOW) which may take many months for your site to be approved, assuming you meet their guidelines. For most affiliate type sites approval is unlikely, unless the site can demonstrate some level of authority.

Still if you have the budget or the patience, then these two directories can make a marked difference in your sites ranking and authority.

Don't freak out, it's just the "Google Dance"

For anyone that hasn’t experienced it, the “Google Dance” is an unexplained massive drop in your search page ranking, followed by an equally massive rise in your ranking. Needless to say this can be a shock when you first experience it.

The reality is nobody truly knows why this happens. As disturbing as the “Google Dance” seems, it is an inevitable consequence of the SEO game. It is a rollercoaster effect for the page involved, a substantial drop in ranking, followed by an equally massive surge back. As disturbing as this may be, it is not an uncommon event.

Don’t stop your optimisation efforts, the “Google Dance” will pass you by soon enough. A common cause of the dance is adding backlinks to your site. Oddly enough, as Google “digests” these links, your site may start dancing. Don’t stress, your site will regain it’s ranking in due course. Be patient and continue your SEO process during the “Google Dances” stay.

The sudden zigzag in your pages ranking is no reason to change anything, you must maintain your SEO efforts. As your Domain age increases the potential for the dance occurring is diminished.

Conclusion: The Google Dance is nothing to fear and something you need to get used to. Don’t let it get you down or have you change your plan. Keep doing things correctly and your site will rank eventually.

These lists will be provided in terms of on-page factors and off-page factors. These lists are not provided in any particular order, because to be honest no one (other than Google) really knows which factors have the greatest importance in the Google algorithm.

Search Engine Optimisation Factors – On Page Factors:

1)    Keyword in the URL
2)    Keyword in the Title Tag
3)    Keyword usage in the Meta Description
4)    Keywords in the first H1 tag
5)    Keyword used at least 3% on page and first 100 words of html
6)   Sufficient content present on the page, a paragraph is not enough
7)   Fresh content. This why google loves blogs, they generally have frequently updating content
8)    Internal linking structure and use of keyword rich anchor text for internal links
9)    Clean code allowing good crawlabilty by search engine spiders

Search Engine Optimisation Factors – Off Page Factors:

1)    External backlinks to the page with referance to quality and quantity
2)    Quantity/Quality of backlinks to the parent domain
3)    Link diversity – domains, IPs, countries, and extensions
4)    Backlink anchor text with regards to relevant keywords
5)    High quality Directory listings, for example Yahoo, dmoz and BOTW
6)    The quantity of indexed pages on the site
7)    Domain age, Google is always more wary of new Domains.
8)    Page rank

There are many other factors to consider when optimising your search engine marketing but these factors are our main prioritys.
It is worth noting that as much as the actual weighting of the algorithm is a mystery, certain factors are undeniably more important. There is a limit to how effective on page factors can be. Once on page factors have been optimised then you can pretty much never have to work on them again. But there is no limitation to the number of backlinks you can build to a page. In fact for some of the more competitve search terms on the web, you can often find several hundred thousand backlinks pointing at a page.

Overall, it is probably best to try to implement all of the above techniques because many of them are relatively easy to do and all have some SEO significance.