A piece of recent news from the online marketing world, which largely escaped the mainstream media, was the announced demise of GeoCities.

If you ever surfed the web in the late 90’s or early 00’s then you’ll be familiar with GeoCities.com. The site started way back in the mid-nineties, offering amateur webmasters the chance to create their own homepages for free. People took up the offer in droves and the site soon had a lot of traffic, with thousands of new GeoCities subdomains starting up each week. By 1999 (the height of the dot com boom) it was worth $3.57 billion according to Yahoo!, as that’s what they paid to acquire it.

Unfortunately, since then Yahoo! has failed to make a profit from GeoCities. Despite it still enjoying high user levels and considerable traffic (an estimated 177 million users in 2008!) Yahoo! decided that it just couldn’t compete with new social media sites like Facebook, and decided that it will close GeoCities down.

This decision will be felt by owners of other websites that offer users something for free. The big problem with many popular sites is just how to turn their large visitor numbers into revenue, i.e. how do you monetize a site where people only come because you give something away for free?

That’s a discussion to have at another time, as there’s another reason, besides nostalgia, why we decided to highlight this topic on an online marketing blog. Looking behind the headlines, the closure of GeoCities could have serious implications on the search engine optimisation of many websites.

Some of the sites on GeoCities are almost 15 years old. They contain some of the oldest content on the web AND some of the oldest links on the web. Consider the value in some of these links, coming from trusted, established sites and having been in place for years. These are often the exact types of links that companies seek to boost their search engine rankings, and the types of links that hold many websites on the first page of Google. Once GeoCities gets taken down it could have quite an effect on the ranking of a lot of websites.

If your site has quite a few in-bound links from Geocities sites then you may soon find that your search engine rankings start to slip.

Find out how at risk you are by going to Yahoo.co.uk typing “linkdomain:YourURL” into the search box, i.e. linkdomain:libertymarketing.co.uk. The results will show all the links pointing to your site and you’ll be able to see if any of these are from GeoCities sites.

If you want to ensure your site still ranks highly, or generally want to improve search engine rankings, then it is important that you start to use link building techniques. The more relevant, varied in-bound links that point to your site, the more Google will trust you, and the more likely you are to appear on the first page results for keywords.

Fast Track Room Booking is a meeting room booking system developed by Intelligent Information Systems (iiS). Having worked with iiS for a number of years, providing Pay Per Click advertising management, they asked us to improve the natural rankings of the website via SEO and link building.

SEO advice

We started by looking at the keywords their market used when searching for this type of software and helped them place these keywords into the site and the copy. We then advised them on some of the more technical elements of SEO that the site needed to have in place in order to make it more search engine friendly and to help avoid Google penalties.

Inbound link building

Once the website was in better shape to attract and convert traffic we started building links to the site. We encouraged links from other relevant websites, looking for links that would help generate targeted traffic as well as boost the Google rankings.

The result?

So far we have generated first page results for many of the main keywords including “room booking” and “room booking software”, terms which now bring in hundreds of new visitors each month as well as additional enquiries each week. As the number of in-bound links grows, the list of keywords the website will be found for will also grow, and the positions within the search results will continue to improve.

If you want to improve your click through rate (the frequency with which people click on your Google Pay Per Click adverts) then you should consider Dynamic Keyword Insertion, using this syntax: {keyword: }

The idea behind Dynamic Keyword Insertion is simple. When keywords in a search term appear in the heading or body of an AdWords advert they appear in bold. Bold adverts attract more attention so people are more likely to click on them. As are adverts that contain the exact keywords that a person is searching for. Wouldn’t it be great then if every pay per click advert contained the exact keywords being searched for in bold? They can…

Instead of creating hundreds of separate adverts for every synonym and plural of a keyword, try using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Group keywords up and place the syntax in the heading. This makes Google automatically use the searched keywords as the title of your advert, improving the likelihood of the searcher clicking on your advert and visiting your website.

Make sure you only use this for keywords grouped together and ones that share the same landing page on your site. Otherwise you run the risk of sending searchers to pages that aren’t relevant, which they’ll just click away from, wasting your budget.

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion also improves your AdWords Quality Score. As one of the determining factors in calculating Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) of an advert, the use of the Dynamic Keyword Insertion syntax will lead to better positioning of your ads without you increasing your spend on each click.

Advanced Dynamic Keyword Insertion techniques:

You’ll notice a gap in the syntax {keyword: }. This is for you to place a default heading, to be shown should the search term be longer than the 25 character limit. The full syntax should therefore look something like {keyword: Default Keyword Here}

Capitalising the K and the W will make all keywords displayed begin with a capital letter, another factor in high click through rates: {KeyWord: Default Keyword Here}

Try using the syntax within either lines of the advert body copy instead of, or as well as, the heading.

Before deciding to roll it out to the rest of your ads, or deciding to cancel the experiment, remember the golden rule – measure the results.

If you use Google Adwords for pay per click advertising and Google Analytics to keep an eye on your website activity then it's worth having a look at the stats, as you may see some discrepancies in the reports between them. A couple of Liberty clients that buy traffic in this way are paying for, and receiving, clicks as usual but Analytics is listing only a fraction of these visitors as coming from google / cpc.

Evidently quite a few other people are also seeing this, their complaints are as shown here.

Google has pointed out that the error could be down to the recent changes in the way Adwords and Analytics accounts link together. You can check that all is well by following this guide. Doesn't help our clients though as their accounts are linked up perfectly, so all we can do is cross our fingers that it's just a small bug and it gets ironed out soon.