Google Print Ads Now Open to All AdWords Advertisers

More than two years after first testing the sale of magazine ads, Google's print ad program has left beta and now allows AdWords advertisers to place ads in more than 200 newspapers across the United States. Google began testing the newspaper ad auction for a small group of advertisers last November with just over 50 newspaper partners, including The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Yesterday, Google announced they would be opening the Google Print Ads system to all AdWords users, allowing companies of all sizes quick and easy access to managing ad campaigns in newspapers across the United States.

The process to begin running print ads is pretty simple.

First, you'll need to log in to your Google AdWords account. You'll notice that a new tab has been added that says "Print Ads."



Click on the "Print Ads" tab and you'll be taken to the "Getting Started" page.



This page will show you an overview of any print campaigns you might have running. To set up a new campaign, click the "Create a new print campaign" link.



The first thing you'll need to do is name your print campaign and set your run dates. (Note: Google uses these run dates to get an idea of what your campaign might cost...you can change the actual ad run dates later.)

Next you'll need to begin your search for newspapers. You can search by newspaper name, by location, by circulation, by available ad size and by which sections of the paper ads are available.



You can see in the image above that I've narrowed my search to include papers selling 2 inches of ad space in the Living section.

Google will then offer up a list of newspapers that fit your search criteria:



Clicking on "info" for any of these papers will bring up a new window with detailed information about the location of the paper, the circulation and current ad prices.



Once an advertiser has reviewed the information about each paper, they can work their way through the list selecting the newspapers they wish to have their ad run in.



Depending on your search criteria, Google may also offer up the option of "Newspaper Packages." Google explains Newspaper Packages this way:

Newspaper packages are groups of newspapers sold together as a bundle at the request of the publishers. Packages often include newspapers that are located in the same metropolitan area or owned by the same parent company.



Once you've selected the newspapers or packages that you wish to bid on, scroll to the bottom of the page and click "continue."

Next, you'll need to choose the ad sizes and ad prices you wish you offer. Google will let you make these specifications for each and every newspaper or newspaper package you have selected.



As you can see in the image above, you'll be asked to select the section of the paper, ad size and days of the week you wish to see your ad run. If a specific section of the paper only appears on certain days, Google's system will limit your selection to those days of the week.

The system will also tell you what the list price of your desired ads is and will allow you to tailor your offer price. The Google Print Ads system users a slider bar that allows you to see what percentage off list price you are offering.

The column on the far right tells you what your maximum ad cost per week is by multiplying your offer price times the number of days you've requested your ad runs.

Once you've selected the ad location, ad size and ad price for each newspaper, Google Print Ads will give you a summary box that shows your total maximum ad spend each week if all of your offers are accepted.

It's important to note that if you are using a standard credit card, Google Print Ads imposes a weekly spend limit on your campaigns. While you will be allowed to place offers for ads that total more than your spending limit, Google will keep a running tab of accepted offers.

As soon as your accepted offers total your weekly spending limit, all other offers will be listed as 'expired' and newspapers will not have the ability to accept those ads. (Advertisers can apply to Google for an increased spending limit.)

Once you've submitted your placement information, Google Print Ads moves on to having you upload the images of your ad files.



At this point you can either upload PDF files of each ad, find a Google Print Ads approved company to create your ad (possibly for free with the help of a Print Ad credit), or defer ad uploads until after your placements have been accepted.

You can also specify whether you plan to change your ad during the course of the ad run. (While Google Print Ads does not allow you to upload more than one ad per newspaper, it does allow you to contact each newspaper individually to arrange for additional ad uploads.)



Finally, Google Print Ads will give you the opportunity to review your entire proposed campaign one last time before you send it off to publishers for their review and approval.



One important thing to note about Google Print Ads campaigns is that they are not being sold through an auction. In other words, advertisers are not directly competing with other advertisers to buy ad space. Instead, Google will send your ad offers to each newspaper publisher where they will be individually reviewed. Publishers may then accept your ad as is, or contact you to initiate conversation about why your ad was refused.

Google claims that ads are generally reviewed and either accepted or rejected within about a day.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/010343.html

Optimizing Content for Universal Search

By now, you've all heard about Google's new Universal Search concept, which combines all the information within its vertical databases into one index to serve a single set of Web search results. As you can imagine, this will require some adjustments to standard search engine optimization techniques. If you have been following the Bruce Clay methodology, then you should already be on the right track to optimizing every aspect of your Web site that is under your control. With the arrival of universal search, it's not just a good idea; it's a necessity.

Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer said the company's goal for universal search is to create "a seamless, integrated experience to get users the best answers." Mayer stated on the official Google blog that the universal search vision would be "one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges" the search engine would face. Mayer first suggested this concept to Google back in 2001. Since then, the company has been building the infrastructure, algorithms and presentation mechanisms needed to blend the different content from Images, Video, News, Maps, Blogs et al into its Web results. This is Google's first step toward removing the partition that separates its numerous search silos, integrating these vast repositories of information into a universal set of search results. The object is to make queries more relevant for users, but what are the ramifications for SEO?

Google Relevancy Challenge

Based on industry research, Google has a relevancy problem because the database is too vast. Back in 2005, Jupiter Research touched on this, stating it identified an opportunity for vertical search engines. The study inferred that general search engines were good at classifying vast amounts of information, but not very good at serving results that helped users make decisions.

A year later, Outsell came out with "Vertical Search Delivers What Big Search Engines Miss," a study that also mentioned the opportunity for vertical search due to dissatisfaction with general search engines. This report published the oft-quoted fact stating that the average Internet search failure rate is 31.9 percent. The study identified two market trends contributing to the growth of vertical search – failed general searches and rising keyword prices in paid search.

Another noteworthy study was conducted by Convera. Over 1,000 online business users were asked about their search practices, successes, and failures. Only 21 percent of the respondents thought that search queries on general search engines were understood, a mere 10 percent found critical information on the first try in general search engines. This study concluded, "To date, professionals have not been adequately served by consumer search engines."

The results of these studies show that Google and other general search engines are challenged to produce relevant results, suggesting vertical and niche search engines could eliminate such problems because the niche databases contain topic-specific information, serving targeted, more relevant answers to user queries.

Google's Solution to Relevancy

Since Google's move toward universal search, one can only assume it has considered the above problems and decided that pulling all its databases together, comparing and ranking them accurately at warp speed, could be the solution to relevancy. Doing this requires new technical infrastructure, including new algorithms, software and hardware, which Google has been working on since 2001 and is now in the process of implementing. Universal search has implications for search marketers because it is a departure from the uniformity that characterized search marketing in the past, requiring adjustments in SEO methodology. Since the modifications will be implemented in steps, immediate changes in the SERPS won't be obvious, and there is time to develop new optimization strategies.

Search Personalization

In addition to universal search, Google is also focusing on personalization in the SERPs. This means users will be seeing different SERPS based on their previous queries, if signed into their Google accounts. Users may or may not notice many changes in the SERPs due to universal search and personalization, depending on their level of sophistication and/or powers of observation. However, marketers will be scrambling. Marketers will need to get their clients listed into as many niche databases as possible to increase the breadth of coverage for universal search. Social media optimization techniques can be used to enhance both universal and personalized search results.

Universal Search Optimization Strategies

The focus on personalization and universal search requires more emphasis on social media SEO strategies because of user interest in creating content and the vast amounts of new multimedia content created daily on the Web. Marketers are beginning to drive traffic via social networking sites, and these efforts are known to enhance search engine optimization campaigns. Strategies include creating multimedia content such as blogs, videos and podcasts, and then getting them listed on social search sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, as well as niche search engines like Technorati, Podzinger and Blinx.

When creating multimedia content, you must ensure that it is tagged and cataloged correctly. Multimedia content is optimized through established fundamental SEO techniques, such as creating keyword-rich, user-friendly content, unique Meta tags, good site navigation and structure, and implementing a successful linking strategy. Below are a few suggestions for creating and submitting multimedia content for several of Google's vertical databases to gain extended reach through universal search.

Google Image Search: It has always been a good idea to use images on your site for illustrating your products and services. Now, this becomes a way for your customers to find your site via Google Image Search. Optimize your images with descriptive, keyword-rich file names and ALT tags. Use accurate descriptions of your image files for the benefit of the vision impaired and others who might need to view the site with text only.

Google Video (beta): As with optimizing images, use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for your video files. Also create a keyword-rich title tag, description tag, and video site map. Create a Web page to launch your video, optimizing content for SEO and using anchor text wherever possible. Besides submitting to Google Video, also include Blinkx and other social networking and search sites like YouTube and Potzinger (audio and video search engine).

Google News: Here's where you can submit your press releases for display as "news" and subsequent indexing. Issue press releases containing current information about new products and events your site is involved with and Google News will likely pick it up.

Google Maps: This is also known as Google Local, a vertical that has been included in Google search results for a while. Give your site a local presence through the Google Maps Local Business Center where local businesses can get a free basic listing to extend their reach in the SERPs.

Google Blog Search (beta): You all have a corporate blog, right? This is how modern companies communicate with their customers and stakeholders. Tag it (digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.), submit to Google Blog search, and extend your reach for Web searches on Google.

In closing, there are many ways social and multimedia content can enhance your SEO efforts. Experiment and learn how to use social media to extend your SEO rankings. As you become aware of the many niche databases for submitting multimedia content, this can go a long way toward gaining visibility through Google's personalized and universal search.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/claudiabruemmer/2007/07/optimizing_content_for_univers.html

Getting Into Google

Last night was our third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England), and we were humbled to have Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spilling the beans about how to get your site into Google. He talked for a half hour or so, and then proceeded to answer audience questions for at least another hour. As I sat there listening to him (yes, I actually listened to this one!), I was struck by what an awesome opportunity it was for everyone in that room to be provided with such important information — straight from Google. It was clear that the 100 or so people in the room agreed. In fact, at 7:30 on the dot, everyone spontaneously stopped their networking activities and simply took their seats without being asked to. These folks definitely came to hear Google!

What Is Indexing?

Dan started out his presentation discussing what “indexing” means and how Google goes about it. Basically, the process for the Google crawler is to first look at the robots.txt file in order to learn where it shouldn’t go, and then it gets down to business visiting the pages it is allowed to visit. As the crawler lands on a page, it finds the relevant information contained on it, then follows each link and repeats the process.

Robots.txt Explored

Dan proceeded to explain how to use your robots.txt file for excluding pages and directories from your site that you might not want indexed, such as the cgi-bin folder. He told us how each of the major search engines have their own commands for this file but that they’re working to standardize things a bit more in the future.

In terms of what the crawler looks at on the page, he said there are over 200 factors, with “relevance” playing a big part in many of them.

Google Still Loves Its PageRank

Dan also discussed the importance of PageRank (the real one that only Google knows about, not the “for-amusement-purposes-only” toolbar PR that many obsess over). He let us know that having high-quality links is still one of the greatest factors towards being indexed and ranked, and then he proceeded to explain how building your site with unique content for your users is one of the best approaches to take. (Now, where have you heard that before? He explained how creating a community of like-minded individuals that builds up its popularity over time is a perfect way to enhance your site.

Did You Know About These Tags?

We were also treated to some additional tips that many people may not have known about. For instance, did you know that you could stop Google from showing any snippet of your page in the search engine results by using a “nosnippet” tag? And you can also stop Google from showing a cached version of your page via the “noarchive” tag. Dan doesn’t recommend these for most pages since snippets are extremely helpful to visitors, as is showing the cache. However, Google understands that there are certain circumstances where you may want to turn those off.

Breaking News!

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

Webmaster Central Tools

Dan couldn’t say enough good things about their Webmaster Central tools. I have to say that seems to be very common with all the Google reps I’ve heard speak at various conferences. The great thing is that they’re not kidding! If you haven’t tried the webmaster tools yet, you really should because they provide you with a ton of information about your site such as backward links, the keyword phrases with which people have found each page of your site, and much, much more!

Sitemaps Explored

One of the main tools in Webmaster Central is the ability to provide Google with an XML sitemap. Dan told us that a Google sitemap can be used to provide them with URLs that they would otherwise not be able to find because they weren’t linked to from anywhere else. He used the term “walled garden” to describe a set of pages that are linked only to each other but not linked from anywhere else. He said that you could simply submit one of the URLs via your sitemap, and then they’d crawl the rest. He also talked about how sitemaps were good for getting pages indexed that could be reached only via webforms. He did admit later that even though those pages would be likely to be indexed via the sitemap, at this time they would still most likely be considered low quality since they wouldn’t have any PageRank. Google is working on a way to change this in the future, however.

Flash and AJAX

Lastly, Dan mentioned that Google still isn’t doing a great job of indexing content that is contained within Flash and/or AJAX. He said that you should definitely limit your use of these technologies for content that you want indexed. He provided a bit of information regarding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), and explained that when used in the manner for which it was intended, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution for Google. Dan said that Google does hope to do a better job of indexing the information contained in Flash at some point in the future.

The Q&A

Many of the points mentioned above were also covered in greater detail during Dan’s extensive Q&A session. However, there were many additional enlightening tidbits that got covered. For instance, Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst Online asked about Google’s new Universal Search, specifically as it applied to when particular videos (that were not served up from any Google properties) would show up in the main search results. Dan explained that in Universal Search, the videos that show up are the same that show up first while using Google’s video search function.

The Dreaded Supplemental Results

Of course, someone just *had* to ask about supplemental results and what causes pages to be banished there. (This is one of the most common questions that I hear at all SEO/SEM conferences.) Dan provided us with some insights as to what the supplemental results were and how you could get your URLs out of them. He explained that basically the supplemental index is where they put pages that have low PageRank (the real kind) or ones that don’t change very often. These pages generally don’t show up in the search results unless there are not enough relevant pages in the main results to show. He had some good news to report: Google is starting to crawl the supplemental index more often, and soon the distinction between the main index and the supplemental index will be blurring. For now, to get your URLs back into the main results, he suggested more incoming links (of course!).

There was a whole lot more discussed, but I think this is enough to digest for now! All in all, my SEMNE co-founder Pauline and I were extremely pleased with how the night unfolded. We had a great turnout, met a ton of new contacts, caught up with a bunch of old friends, and received some great information straight from Google!

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/whalen/2007/0712_jw1.html