UPDATE:
Speed PPC has just launched version 3 of this powerful tool with even more search engine support (including Yahoo), keyword libraries, ad copying, advanced bidding, cleaning features…. You can find out more and get your copy of SpeedPPC.

Through April 15th, 2008 they are offering $100 Off Speed PPC and 12 months free access to their Clickbank Mining Tool.

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Well, it’s 2am and I just launched a new commercial site. The site, Subscriptionville.com, is a magazine store operated in affiliation with a 3rd party fullfillment center. This is phase 1 of the project, and I hope to eventually build this into a large magazine comparison shopping service, but that will have to wait until more time is available. One of the great things about this project is that the fullfillment company provides a datafeed of all the titles, which means I have about 1000 different items to promote and generate revenue from. One of the big disadvantages is that there are about 1000 different items to promote and keep track of. Since my primary form of advertising (at least in the early stages) will be through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, that leaves a lot keywords and ad text to manage.Because of the volume of information to be managed, I decided it might be a good idea to invest in a tool to automate a lot of the tasks required to set up a large PPC campaign. The best tool I was able to locate is a software package and membership site called SpeedPPC. This is definitely a tool for somewhat experienced PPC advertisers, but if your comfortable with this type of advertising, then SpeedPPC can be a lifesaver for large volume, tightly focused PPC ad campaigns. That said, there were a couple of areas where it fell a little short - at least for what I needed in this case, but I expect I will get a lot of good use out of it on future projects. I plan to write a more detailed review of SpeedPPC in the near future, and will hopefully be able to offer some documentation to explain some of the shortcomings (there’s not many, but you need to be aware of them) and provide tools and information to help overcome them.Anyway, I am writing this as I have just finished building a Google Adwords campaign to advertise nearly 1000 magazine titles - 1600 ad groups, 3000 text ads and 50,000 keywords. All this in hopes that magazines might be a profitable business for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Now that it’s 3am, I think I should head to bed…Such is the life of an web developer and affiliate marketer.

It’s been awhile since my last post, and that means business has been good. I have a series of great new client projects to work, and that has kept me pretty busy. However, I needed a break from the layout and coding, so I thought I would add a new entry to the blog. This one deals with the use, or lack of use, of www on your sites URL, how it can affect your search engine rankings, and what you can do to correct the issue.

First, what really is the issue with using www or not you might ask. For one, it’s an issue of what is the best URL to serve for a given web page, otherwise referred to as canonicalization. Most of us would consider the following to be the same thing:

grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com/index.htm

Actually, the list could be a lot longer, and in this case these all point to the same page… but they don’t have to. Each of these URLs could actually represent a different page, and that’s how the search engines see it, as different pages. Just check out the following image for reference:




Notice above how Google has listed both grademyshades.com and www.grademyshades.com as two separate listings. So what’s the big deal? The deal is two-fold. First, search engines don’t like duplicate content and will very often hand out penalties because of it. This is exactly how the search engines see this - as duplicate content - two different pages with identical information and this is something you should definitely avoid. Second, search engines place a lot of weight on links from other sites to your pages. Let’s say that some of those links include the www in the url, and some do not. You are essentially splitting those links up between what the search engine sees as two different pages, and neither version of your page will rank as well as if all those links were pointed to the same page.

Good news, there is a simple fix that essentially makes the non-www version non existent. Just add the following bit of code to your .htaccess file (place in the root directory of your website - and replace domain.com with your domain) :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

What this does is redirect any requests for the non-www version of you site to use the www version. It also issues a 301 permanent redirect code, so that the search engines will know to only index the www version. And there you have it - 2 simple lines of code to prevent or help correct what could be a big problem for your search engine optimization efforts.

Want more information on the subject? Here’s a good link from an industry insider on the subject of canonical urls (primarily from a google point of view) that should help answer more questions.

I noticed yesterday that Google released a new tool for advertisers, the Website Optimizer. This new tool is included within the Adwords interface. If you have heard of AB Testing, or split testing, or multivariate testing, the Website Optimizer is suppose to simplify the process of tracking results. You can create multiple variations of a landing page, with different headers, product descriptions, link text, images, etc, and tag each variation. You also indicate what sort of action you are trying to encourage from a visitor, whether it be a sale, a newsletter subscription, a download, etc. The Website Optimizer tool will track results for a few days, and will then start reporting which variations do the best at delivering the desired action. One of the nicest features is that it shows which combinations (assuming you tried varying more than one item) produce the best results. This kind of insite can be crucial to improving the ROI of your online advertising and the profitability of your business.For more details, including sample reporst and a demo, visit

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer

I haven’t implemented this in any of my own projects yet, but am anxious to give it a try. It definitely sounds promising, and being a free tool, it’s hard to lose anything but the time involved in setting it up.