We all know that Keyword Quality Score in Google Adwords determines how relevant your keywords are to the advertisement, and the secret of achieving maximum quality score has never been fully revealed. Recently I’ve been testing the impact to quality score by *Click Through Rate* Vs. *Ads relevancy to keywords*, the campaign is targeting local entertainment business. In this case, all the paid search keywords are local keywords, so click through rate was pretty high.

Before show you the results, you may want to watch this video officially released by Google. This is an introduction of Google Ad Auction system by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. After this video, you will have a better idea why CTR is so important to quality scores.

I am a big believer in “SEO is nothing without providing decent user experience to your visitors“. Imagine you ranked as #1 for many popular keywords, but your website is crap and people who enter your website cannot find what they want, they will definitely go away and never come back again.

Well, you must be curious how the hell I could learn website user experience from Gordon Ramsay’s TV Progam: Kitchen Nightmares. Before I tell you the full story, please let me quickly introduce this TV program to readers who have never watched it. Each episode of Kitchen Nightmares was about how Chef Gordon Ramsay helped a desperate restaurant and saved them from closing. I watched several episodes of Kitchen Nightmares during Christmas (check out my Xmas seo posts collection) because I simply love food and cooking. What surprised me was that running a restaurant was amazingly similar to running a website, and below are the lessons I learnt from this TV program.

First off, I want to say thanks to SEOmoz (a very authoritative SEO blog) for holding this amazing SEO webinar. Though it was SEOmoz’s first ever webinar, but apparently it was really successful (SEOmoz had to add a second session due to overwhelming responses).  I missed first webinar session due to arrived home very late on 10th Dec. For the second session, which was few hours ago, I finally managed to get home early (6:45pm London), though was still late for first two chapters. This wrap-up is just for those who hasn’t got a chance to join this webinar and my note taking speed was not fast enough, I am sorry for any missed part.

seo tips from seomoz pro webinar

This link building strategies webinar covered following topics

As you work for SEO, you  must remember famous seo expert quiz created by seomoz back to 2007, right?  Do you still remember what was your first time score, were you newbie, master or even DARKLORD? Well, today, Seomoz rolled out a Keyword Research Quiz for you to test your keyword research knowledge and of course, to have some fun at the same time. Unlike massive number of 75 questions in seo expert quiz (and it said only to take 10 minutes to finish..grrr, 8 seconds for one question), Keyword Research Quiz has only 17 questions, I am pretty sure you will be able to finish them within 5 – 10 minutes. Have some fun

keyword research test

It is yet another typical effective linkbaiting strategy, fun + knowledge testing + badge! According to the data analysed in backlink analysis tool, total 762 backlinks were found linking to seo expert quiz page, 261 of them were from the badge. Very impressive, isn’t it?

I have just finished the quiz test, and score was 82%, not that satisfied because I spent quite a lot of time on keyword research. So here I am going to share the questions that I had wrong answer.

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.

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).