Considering that Quality Score is such an integral part of the AdWords system, it sure is hidden away, but Quality Score isn’t the only thing that you can turn on and off in the columns.

Here is the 2 minute tip guide to the best and most useful PPC Columns.

Quality Score

Where you can find it?

Key Words tab > Attributes > Qual. score

What does it do?

Potentially the most useful of all the columns. This shows the Quality Score of the keyword. If you don’t know what Quality Score is then Google it. You will find millions of results on other blogs telling you what it is and how to increase it.

Est. top of page bid

Where you can find it?

Key Words tab > Attributes > Est. top page bid

What does it do?

Shows you what you should aim for with individual keyword Max CPC values. Obviously you should take into account the Quality Score and other aspects of the account and not just set it as the value this column shows you!

Match type

Where you can find it?

Key Words tab > Attributes > Match type

What does it do?

It does what it says on the tin. It shows you what match type your keywords are. This is great for new comers to AdWords who often get confused by the “” [ ].

Lost impression share (budget)

Where you can find it?

Ad Groups tab > Competative Metrics > Lost IS (budget)

What does it do?

It tells you how many impressions you are losing because your budget is too low. Incredibly useful if your client is being tight with the budget, this allows you to prove to them how much business they could potentially be losing!

Lost impression share (rank)

Where you can find it?

Campaign tab as well as the Ad Groups > Competative Metrics > Lost IS (Rank)

What does it do?

Similar to above, but based on rank. However if your campaign is setup correctly this should always be 0% as you should always be on the first page.

These are my personal favourites to use, let me know if you use anything different, or for any different reasons.

Here is our second post about SEO Link Building Techniques, our first post was about SEO Directory Submissions, have a read if you missed it.

This week’s technique we will discuss is “reciprocal link exchanges”. This is a pretty simple technique to understand. In the past it was fairly useful for quickly creating links, these days there are people in the SEO industry who debate the usefulness of reciprocal link exchanges. I still believe they have their uses for low competition keywords and niche terms.

What Are Reciprocal Link Exchanges?

Reciprocal links are formed when two different websites link to each other, it is possibly the easiest form of link building to understand, the diagram below illustrates exactly what a reciprocal link is:

This is fairly straight forward I think you will agree.

How To Set Up A Reciprocal Link Exchange?

The easiest way to set these link exchanges up is to find another web master who is looking for the same thing. The simplest way to find these people is to use a “link network” (be careful with these and do some research before jumping in). I have used The UK Link Exchange in the past, but please be aware there is a right and a wrong way to use it, I will post about this another time.

Link networks are full of other people looking for exactly the same as you, this is a fairly primitive method of finding reciprocal links and often the sites in these link exchanges are very low quality.

A much better way of creating a reciprocal link is to carefully pick who you want to exchange with. Do your research, make sure the website owner is likely to link back to you and his website is of a good quality. You can either take your chances and ask for a link straight away or a far better way is to build a relationship with the website owner, think of it as a business networking exercise. Get to know them first make conversation and slowly as a “trust” is built up between you then you can discuss the possibility of a link swap.

Use Social Media To Obtain Links

It is remarkably easy these days to start building relationships with site owners, usually the higher quality websites will also have social media profiles, FaceBook, Twitter, Google+ etc… This is your opportunity to get talking! Make sure you are worth talking to though. Don’t start a conversation with something like “Hi mate” or “Hello buddy”, if you can offer them some advice, something free or answer a question for them or something similar this is a far better way of breaking the ice.

Email For A Link Exchange.

If you can’t find them via social media, it will be more difficult to build a relationship, you will need to email them and ask them for a link (difficult as link requests usually get ignored via email), emailing has a fairly low success rate if not done correctly. You should always try to build a relationship via email if possible, this will give you a better chance of building links.

Pick Up The Phone.

You can call them up on their telephone, this takes a certain level of confidence on your part but it is a fantastic way to obtain a link. It is harder for the site owners to ignore you if you call them and ask directly. You must always remember to highlight the reasons why they should link with you and tell them what they will get in return. I have seen great success using this method of building reciprocal links.

Once you have spoken to somebody over the phone you can then email them as you have already started to build a relationship.

They Can Be Set Up Quickly

Reciprocal link exchanges can be set up very quickly, sometimes within 10 minutes. Other methods of link building may take longer as you are relying on the links to be built more naturally.

Final Thoughts

This is an old method of building links, it can still be used effectively if done correctly. Be careful not to exchange links with low quality sites, always try to find a site with a higher PR score (or Domain Auth) than your own.

When looking for exchange partners, try to find a site which will be open to an exchange, but if possible hasn’t exchanged links with a huge number of other sites.

Build a relationship with the site owner or web master, if he/she exchanges links with you once they are likely to do it again. Keep their details in a contact book and stay in touch! I have a nice list of other web masters who I have exchanged with in the past.

If you are interested in becoming an awesome link builder I would strongly suggest you guys follow Paddy Moogan on twitter, also check his site out it is full of awesome tips on how to build links. http://www.paddymoogan.com/

I personally learnt a lot from Paddy when I saw him speaking at an SEO conference in London, check out my report on the conference.

Thanks.

Andy Morley – @andymorleyseo

These are amazing, they have great functionality and display your work in a professional manner. They are soo good you may not even need to create your own website… Initially.

Check them out as follows…

• Carbonmade.com
• Behance.net
• Shownd.com
• Coroflot.com
• ProfessionalOnTheWeb.com
• DeviantArt.com
• DesignRelated.com
• PortFoliosFriend.com

Just a quick post today.

Thanks.

Andy.

RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and is basically a special type of XML document. RSS Feeds are generally used to provide content used for syndication across the web, the most common use for RSS was by the news agencies who would provide an RSS feed which other news agencies would use as content for their websites.

Why should we care?

There are many different uses for RSS feeds other than for news syndication, you can use them to post the same content across all the sites you manage for example. If you run a network of websites selling products you can post your special offers across your entire network using RSS. For those of us interested in SEO there may be duplicate content related issues if this is over done.

You can display your latest “blog posts” or “tweets” via an RSS feed . If you wanted to keep adding fresh content to your home page you could set up a widget to pull in your RSS feed directly onto the front page of your site.

You can even use RSS feeds to create back links for your website, lots of back links!

Why code one manually?

This is a strange concept, because if you code them manually it will mean there is a great level of “up keep” needed. If you are running a blog the feed is usually generated for you, all your latest posts are automatically added to the Feed.

This isn’t always ideal, auto generated Feeds can contain posts you don’t want to be freely available to the rest of the world. The are situations when coding by hand is required.

This is basically because you have greater control over what the feed contains, if you wanted a specific message to be displayed across your network of sites on a certain day this method would work fine.

Another use for manually built RSS feeds is if you wanted to convert your website structure into an RSS feed. But why I hear you ask… Because you can create back links to your site pages as I briefly mentioned above.

How to start.

RSS files are written using xml, which is a tag based language similar to XHTML. Each RSS file includes information about a website, providing a title for the document and a description, again similar to XHTML. This information is called an “item”.

Item Tag

Each item contains a TITLE, LINK, and DESCRIPTION. Start by placing the opening <item> tag at the top, then place the closing </item> tag at the bottom, like this:

<item>
</item>

Title Tag

Add the <title> tag, following with the text of your title, then end with the </title> tag. It would look like this:

<item>
     <title>Title Of Your Item</title>
</item>

Link Tag

Next, add your link information, beginning with <link>, following with the actual hyperlink, then closing with </link>, to look like this:

<item>
<title>Title Of Your Item</title>
     <link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/page.php</link>
</item>

Description Tag

For your description, you start with the opening <description> tag, then following with the actual description, then closing with the </description> tag. Now you have this:

<item>
<title>The Name of Your Story</title>
<link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/page.php</link>
     <description>Short description of your story</description>
</item>

If you want to add multiple “stories” to your RSS feed, simply replicate the above steps.

Channel Tag

Once you have defined the stories you want to distribute, you need to create a “channel” for them. The channel is usually a description of the entire website not just the page. You will use very similar tags as above, just omit the <item> tags.

The Channel needs a Title, Description and a Link. The Channel information should be placed before your first “Item”.

<channel>
<title>Title Of Your Site</title>
<link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/</link>
<description>Short description about your website or “channel”.</description>
<item>
<title>The Name of Your Story</title>
<link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/page.php</link>
<description>Short description of your story</description>
</item>

Define & Declaire

This last section defines the languages you are coding in and declares the version of RSS you are coding. This is similar to how you declair and define an XHTML document.

Add the following to the beginning of your code.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>

The final tag you need to add is the closing </rss> tag.

You should end up with this…

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>
<title>Title Of Your Site</title>
<link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/</link>
<description>Short description about your website or “channel”.</description>
<item>
<title>The Name of Your Story</title>
<link>http://yourwebsite.co.uk/page.php</link>
<description>Short description of your story</description>
</item>
</rss>

Thanks for reading.

There are many different link building techniques for SEO (website optimisation), this blog post explains what Directory Submissions are and gives some useful tips and advice in how best to use this technique.

What Are Directory Submissions?

The Internet is full of web directories, a web directory is basically a list of websites broken down into categories, these directories are usually user driven, where the site users submit their own website to be added to the list. They assign a category and possibly even a sub category to their submission, you usually have to wait until the directory admin accepts your submission. They don’t always get accepted either. This process can take a number of days or weeks until your site appears in the directory.

Types Of Directory.

There are various types of directory, General directories, Niche directories and Local Directories. Each of these have their own uses.

General Directories.

These are usually full of a whole range of different websites, they accept sites from a wide range of business sectors and a wide range of different topics.

Niche Directories.

These are focused on a small selection of business sectors, and as a result tend to be more relevant for your website.

Local Directories.

These are specific to towns or cities, and usually only list websites within their coverage area.

Not all directories are created equal.

As I previously said, there are literally 1000′s of web directories available, not all of them are useful. There have been 100′s of directories set up purely for people to use for link building, Google isn’t stupid and these directories have very little authority in Googles eyes. To be honest they are pretty easy to spot, as the usually have a very odd domain name.

There are some great directories as well, DMoz.org for example, Yell.com, JoeAnt.com etc… Generally these higher quality directories will charge you for being listed.

Why Should You Use Directories For SEO Link Building?

They are fast and easy to get back links from, if you are starting a link building campaign for your own site or a clients site, directory submissions is a good way to begin collecting links.

The Down Sides.

This is a very old method of link building and as a result has been used and abused over the years. The numbers of poor quality sites in directories brings the quality down, the search engines see 100′s of outbound links from directories which brings the authority scores down.

Summary.

This is an old method, you shouldn’t pin all your hopes on using this alone. Directory Submissions are still useful for creating quick back links, however in recent years the search engines have begun to lower their effectiveness. Directory submissions should be used as part of a link building strategy.

A Few Directories To Get You Started.

Free Submissions.

• Brown Book
• Hot Frog
• DoWeb
• Search Ramp
• Flesko
• Scrub The Web

Paid Directories.

• Yell.com
• JoeAnt
• Kelly Search

To find more directories you can search for “directory submission list” or “submit site” etc in Google.

So you want to become a web designer? I always get asked how I got into the Web Design Industry?  and was it difficult? Its not difficult at all!! You just need some drive and a lot of enthusiasm.

People often ask “can you become a web designer by self study?”

I have been building websites for over 15 years now (12 years commercially), when I started things were easier, the industry was relatively new and there were no where near as many designers as there are these days. However I think my tips below are still very relevant today, please read on.

1 – Anybody can do it!

Its not rocket science! learning to become a web designer isn’t as hard as people think, yes you need certain attributes to be successful as follows…

• Be Motivated – You need to have motivation to learn, without it you will struggle.
• Be Persistent – Try and try again, you will inevitably get things wrong when you are learning.
• Creativity – To be a great designer you need to have that creative flair, if you don’t have it, don’t worry, just become excellent at coding!
• Self Studying – You will need to teach yourself, and self study is a huge part of progressing in web design.

2 – Where To Start

You need to learn the basics of the web! learn and read about what makes up the internet, how IP addresses work, what a webserver is, also the different programming languages available to us web designers.

XHTML & CSS are essential these are the simplest languages to learn and the most useful (in my opinion). There are plenty of tutorial sites online I would recommend either W3Schools – www.w3schools.com or HTMLDOG – www.htmldog.com.

If you want to be extra swish you can learn HTML5, but be careful as this isn’t fully supported across all browsers yet.

3 – Get Coding

Whilst you are learning to code, I would strongly suggest you keep your “tool belt” fairly sparse. I always tell people to keep things simple and code using “Note Pad” only or “TextEdit” for Mac users. This will force you to learn how to code correctly, and will teach you the “syntax” of the languages, as you will discover later on in your career, syntax is important and languages like ASP & PHP rely on it being correct.

Once you are comfortable with the basics of coding, it might be time to “invest” in software to help you. The industry standard for Web Designers is Adobe Dreamweaver. however this is expensive, I would look instead at using “Komodo Edit” this is free!!

Tools such as these make coding faster and easier, as they tend to have a “predictive text” type of feature, similar to your mobile phone. They also have built in functions which will help you produce your code.

4 – A Picture Paints A Thousand Words

To succeed in web design, every web designer needs to master a “graphics package” the industry standards for web designers are Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks. Again these are very expensive, but there are cut down versions you can get such as Photoshop Elements.

The process of designing a website generally starts with a wireframe or prototype, which is then put together in the graphics package. The web designer then transfers the design into XHTML & CSS code.

5 – Practice Makes Perfect

Like anything from learning to ride a bike to playing the guitar, the more you do something the better you will get. Web Design is no different, the more practice you get at mocking up designs in your graphics package and transferring them across into code the better you will become.

6 – Be Social, Join The Community

No I don’t mean go and join your local community group, I mean get involved with other designers, look at what they are producing and try to use it as inspiration, get talking to other designers find out how they do things, which sites they use, which blogs they read.

This tip is a million times easier in the days of social media, when I started learning there was no Twitter or FaceBook, hell even Google didn’t exist! Use social media to find other designers and get to know them, talk to them and often you will find that they will love to help you learn.

Eventually the relationships you build here may even help you find a job!

FaceBook especially is a good place to start, there are literally tons of FaceBook pages and Groups dedicated to web design, LinkedIn is another great place to find web design groups to help develop your skills.

And finally Twitter…. I love Twitter, those who have worked with me in the past will know how much I adore it. People often don’t “get it” initially, Twitter should be used to find information like any regular search engine, the benefit if Twitter is that search results are “real time” and often point you directly to the person providing you with the information!

Use Twitter as a “networking tool” build your contacts and get talking to people! ( @Andy_Morley is my Twitter name.)

7 – Finally, Keep Learning

The Internet is a fast moving place, the web design industry needs to keep up, there are always new technologies, new websites, new techniques and softwares becoming available, it is one of (if not the fastest) growing industries in the world.

YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO BE LEFT BEHIND!

Remember to continue learning, keep reading the industry blogs, keep talking to other designers to discover the latest tricks of the trade.

Thanks for reading.

Andy Morley.

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