We all know that Google did a good job on collecting user data in order to improve user search experience, I am really appreciated their work. But from point of view of a company who has large user data, there is a big concern that Google can somehow collect these data. Is Google really instrusive to other companys’ user data?  Or we are just worried too much.

Is google intrusive to user data?

Recently, I was trying to convince one of my clients to implement Google Analytics code as an additional tracking solution to the existing third-party tracking application, as I was not familiar with that third-party application and I was really keen to use Google Analytics for analysing user search behavior accurately.

But their director of IT was very cautious about Google because he read something negative (I don’t know what it is) about Google in terms of data collecting and hence he felt Google is intrusive to precious user data of the company (few millions).

I did a bit of research on searching anything negative about Google data collecting via Bing.com but didn’t find what I was looking for. So I posted this question on Linkedin, here is the original copy:

This is a post about paid search in SEM. How do you know if your paid search keywords are really used by customers? Do you know there is a big chance that you are wasting money on Google Adwords for useless keywords and you don’t even know? You might say this to against me, “We have well-organised Ad groups with two-words and three words phrase-match keywords that have high quality scores. We also put some negative keywords that prevents irrelevant clicks, the Return-on-Investment(ROI) is positive, therefore we are satisfied.” Well, you did a good job, but you could do a BETTER job if you know exactly what your targeting audiences are searching.

customer's exact google search query

Most of the Google Adwords advertisers have two things in common:

1. Start a new campaign with Brainstorming some keywords and then use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to expand the keywords list, it will more or less contain some guesses even if they are experienced. (I will explain why experience is not always working later)

2. Don’t know how to track exact paid keywords that customers use.

In order to better target right audiences and understand their search behaviors, you have to know what search queries your customers type in search engines.  So let us resolve these two problems one by one.

It is nearly two years since I first touched Google Analytics and I’ve been in search engine marketing industry for approximately one year. I never call myself a Google Analytics expert, not only because I am not experienced enough in online marketing industry, but also due to massive data it provides and there are so many ways to analyse.

mess up google analytics

Today I want to sum up some problem I met and few mistakes I made using Google Analytics once I just started my career as an online marketing consultant. This entry is to share my experience in the past, and also, remind myself there is still a long way to go and I have to keep hard-working.

What’s the easiest way to let search engines such as Google to crawl your website? The best SEO practice is to submit your website and sitemap of it to search engines. Yes, I know 99.9% of you know this basic knowledge. BUT, which sitemap format will you choose? HTML sitemap or XML sitemap?

Let’s see what Matt Cutts says on the video

If cannot see the video in the post, click here to watch.

Here I sum up Matt Cutts’ points

1. Google likes both HTML sitemap and XML sitemap
2. Google does not guarantee to crawl links from XML sitemap
3. HTML sitemap will definitely help Google to find links
4. Additionally,  Users prefer HTML sitemap (at least I do, I will show you later in this post)
5. If you can only create one sitemap, create HTML sitemap
6. If you can, do both HTML sitemap and XML sitemap

Well, I guess you know the answer already, maybe it varies for other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo. But if you wish your sitemap perform better in Google, you’d better create both, or at least HTML sitemap.

Plus, Mr.Google uses HTML sitemap as well, check it via http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Do people really prefer HTML sitemap to XML sitemap?

I will showcase my website – seoblogmoney.com as an example.

Do you know you may miss some SEO opportunities to rank well for your targeting keyword because of wrong anchor text or even missing anchor text in existing inbound links?

People talk link building strategy every day, it’s an endless task to acquire inbound links, no matter it’s link baiting (bascially it costs a lot of time to create something useful), or social network profiles establishing (not very useful, especially if you don’t have time to get involved), or directories (you are more likely to pay for the good ones), or buying links (money + risk) or any other form of link building. Yes, it’s the most difficult part in SEO, and it’s unavoidable for most of the websites who want to rank better.

However, there are some companies who have good reputations, old websites with a bunch of quality inbound links already, and they are yet to know the great benefits of SEO link building implementations. One of my clients are amongst the companies I described above, they are very cautious of executing any SEO off-page optimisation and social network involvement due to the risk of damaging the reputation of their business. It’s understandable especially they are in the traditional industry, they haven’t got great knowledge about internet and if there is anything goes wrong, the impact would be disastrous. However, they still want to rank better for their keywords…

Due to restricted policy, I could not use my client as a perfect case study. The situation for them is, pretty much done all the SEO on-page optimasation, old domain with high authority, quite a few quality inbound links, and they are yet to decide to start link building or not, even though I proposed so many times with different ways to approach. So I tried proposed not to acquire new inbound links, but to optimise existing inbound links.

Here I randomly picked www.next.co.uk as an example (assume it does not want any further link building), and show step-by-step how I come up with this existing inbound links optimisation strategy.

Is Google moving out of China? This won’t be a good news for SEOers China, as Baidu.com will dominate the entire search market. I read this on a random SEO blog which I cannot remember the name, a Chinese internet expert whose name is Yanping Hu posted “Google is moving out of China, all the servers are relocating” on sina microblog (similar to twitter) and he ensured what he said is truth. Soon, Google PR denied this information as expected.

Here is the screenshot of his message:

Translation here:

True message: Google starts to move out of China, all the servers in China are relocating

If this news is true, why would Google give up Chinese market? Let’s go back to the history and reveal the story between Google and Baidu (Baidu is the largest search engine is China)

First of all, I would say there are more than hundreds of great blogs about internet marketing including Search Engine Optimisation(SEO), Search Engine Marketing(SEM), Social Network, Affiliate Marketing, E-commerce and so on. But lets be realistic, nobody has time to read all of them, and even if someone has the time to read them all, he should spend time on doing practical work rather than be a bookworm (maybe should call it blogworm?).

I’ve been reading many blogs since I started touching internet marketing, I was mainly focused on SEO blogs, but soon found out internet marketing is not only about SEO, it’s just HUGE. So I expanded my reading list to SEM, social network, affiliate marketing, e-commerce and designing, and chose the best ones amoung them.

Here I break blogs down to 5 categories, SEO/SEM (top 3), Social Network (top 3), Affiliate Marketing (top 3), Designing (top 1) and ecommerce (top 1).

what wordpress plugins should I use

“What wordpress plugin should I use?” This is the common question to those who are new to wordpress. From my experience, the thing you need to do is to find out what do you exactly blog and who do you want to blog to. Is your blog talking about professional design? Or is it just about your daily life? Once you answered two question above, then you are good to go.

For this blog, it is about my SEO experience gained by the projects I deal with and other top SEO blogs I subscribe. (I know you are very likely to be confused by my domain name, but I purchased this domain before I changed my mind. It was planned to blog about monetising the blog, but I think I need more experience and better to build my own from very beginning.) So I am blogging to those who are interested in SEO, PPC, Social Network etc, and this type of reader doesn’t really need over-edited blog or many fancy-looking functionalities.

Here I simply break my desired wordpress plugins down into 2 parts