Even though the website for My Branded Merchandise was launched only four weeks ago, it has already issued quotes in excess of £130,000 and started making thousands of pounds worth of sales. These figures are amazing when you consider the amount spent on clicks has yet to break the £100 mark!

This exceptional return on investment has been due to the Pay Per Click advertising campaigns that we set up on the Google Adwords system. We created and now manage a number of targeted adverts that bring in a lot of high quality traffic to the site for a very small investment.

Instant, low-cost, high-quality traffic

Within hours of the site being launched, it started receiving visitors and within a day it started to receive enquiries and requests for quotations.

A few of the enquiries so far have included:

- A central London advertising agency that wanted branded slippers for a client
- A pharmaceutical company that needed branded mugs
- A council that needed their logo on USB memory sticks
- A software company that wanted branded pens to hand out at a conference

My Branded Merchandise is rare in the promotional products industry, as it is a website that can take orders and process payments online. Most competing websites are unable to do this due to the complexities of the order and personalisation process.

Click here to visit the website.

Outsourced Pay Per Click management from only £99 a month

If you are interested in Pay Per Click advertising, then speak to us about setting up and managing campaigns on your behalf. Your account will be run by an experienced online advertiser that holds the Qualified Google Advertising Professional certificate. Our services start at only £99 per month (plus VAT) so there really is no need for you to spend lots of time and energy learning Pay Per Click and running campaigns in-house.

The argument over whether news sites should offer subscription-based paid for content or continue giving away free news stories reached the point of no return earlier this month when Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, took a public swing at Google, saying that his company will be removing its content from the search engine “within months”.

Murdoch has made his feelings regarding paid-for content clear for a while, believing that people get far too much for free. This time, however, is the first time he has made the argument so public and so personal. Referring to news aggregation websites as “plagiarists” and “content kleptomaniacs” that “steal our stories”, Murdoch threatened to sue websites, including the BBC, for the way they use News Corp content and believes that he can get the law courts to start issuing online gagging orders.

One prominent site in the News Corp family, The Wall Street Journal, already has a subscription model in place which allows non-subscribers to only read the first paragraph of an article. However, if web users access it through the Google search engine, they can read the story in its entirety.

Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer at News Corp, said the Murdochs’ intentions were to block Google from accessing his websites and believed that other media websites would soon follow suit. “We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online,” said Mr Miller. “I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”

He also believes that British newspapers owned by News Corporation, including The Sun and The Times would be able to survive without the search engine driving traffic to their websites.

Murdoch must have a very robust revenue model planned for his sites as Google currently sends a tremendous amount of web users to them, something which could soon stop. According to a Google spokesperson: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute”. Is this something that Murdoch has overlooked? It is highly unlikely, but he must think that the appeal of his news sites has the ability to survive and prosper without Google.

Shortly before the arguments started, a YouGov survey was commissioned and asked the general public and media experts alike who they consider more influential, Murdoch or Google. With nearly two thirds of the votes, the 78 year old media mogul enjoyed a landslide victory. There is no doubt in the public mind that Rupert Murdoch is a very powerful man, but are people wrong to write off Google as the underdog?

Behind the uber-cool offices and perception of a bunch of geeks having a very good time without hurting anybody (“You can make money without doing evil” is on the Google corporate policy list, as is “You can be serious without a suit”) lies a business that is very good at getting exactly what it wants.

Since it was started, just 11 years ago, the company now generates many billions of dollars a year and has expanded its reach from providing a simple internet search system to a near online monopoly. When Google wanted to offer advertising directly to businesses it launched the Adwords system, which is now one of the most popular ways to promote a website and brought the search engine $21bn in revenue last year. When the company wanted to take on the world of video it bought and nurtured YouTube, a site where hundreds of millions of videos are now watched every single day. And when it set its sights on offering people a free email service, it soon saw itself in the top three providers with tens of millions of users.

There is a pattern here. It is one of a business that has shown great imagination and flexibility and has enjoyed unprecedented success in almost everything it attempts – and that’s before you look at the monetary value of these projects. Speaking in the US at a search engine conference recently, Bob Brisco of Internet Brands Inc. stated that the worth of all publicly and privately traded internet companies is around $350 billion. This figure is important for two reasons. Firstly, it is greater than the value of all other media companies in the world, showing that internet property is now more valuable than offline business and secondly, of that $350 billion, Google owns half. As such, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Murdoch may have met his match.

Another market that Google entered and soon started dominating is that of online news. With the popular Google News service, the search engine trawls through online newspapers and blogs from across the globe, taking stories and grouping them for searchers to view in one place. Even though Google does not create any news content itself, its site is now one of the most popular news brands in the world. Adverts are placed next to other peoples news content, bringing healthy revenue to the search engine, without it having to write a word. Murdoch has seen this and has his eyes set on bringing some of that money to News Corp.

Disallowing a search engine from viewing web pages is technically a simple process and one that Murdoch could have implemented a long time ago if he had wanted to. Making this argument public and using it as a rally cry to other media websites shows that there is a much larger objective in Murdoch’s mind. Is he planning to scare Google into paying for the right to index his news content? It makes sense. He previously got Google to pay for the right to exclusively index Myspace, a News Corp property. Many website owners are speculating that the goal may be to strike a deal with another search engine, most likely Bing, where it will instead have sole access to the articles.

Whatever his agenda, Murdoch needs to play this one carefully. If he starts making unreasonable demands or helps one of Google’s competitors to begin eating up market share, then it may decide to fight back by creating news content of its own. If this happens, and considering its record to date,  Google will probably become one of the industry leaders within a very short time and Murdoch may have played a major part in helping to create his greatest rival.

(This article was writen for and first published on Waleshome.org, here).

Last week saw PubCon, an SEO and online marketing conference in Las Vegas. Each year thousands of professional web developers and marketers meet up to hear about the latest changes in the world of search engines and PubCon 2009 offered a lot of information for them all to think over.

One of the most prominent speakers at the event was Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google. Whenever Cutts speaks, search engine marketers listen, as there are very valuable insights into the ways Google works and the possible changes in how they rank websites.

Even though Liberty was not in attendance, we have kept an eye on what was discussed and have chosen to highlight a few of the points which were discussed as potential future rankings factors.

1. A website that loads quickly = good

The time it takes your web pages to load could have an effect on how Google ranks your site. Cutts said that while a site with slow pages won't necessarily drop in the rankings, one which acts quickly could rise. This is good news for businesses that invest in quality websites and hosting. This is an SEO factor that you have complete control over and if you give users a better experience, then Google could recognise this by rewarding your site a more prominent position in the search results.

2. Repeating keywords in footer links = bad

Cutts was asked to review specific websites and on one there were many keyword rich internal links which he viewed negatively. Many of these links were from the footer and to deep pages within the site. If you have a website where you have stuffed keywords into the anchor text of your footer then this may be something you want to re-address.

3. Blocking the Internet Archive = bad

Sites that block the home of the Wayback Machine can be viewed as waving a spam flag at Google. Many websites choose not to let the Internet Archive index their site, something that Cutts believes is the type of behaviour associates with spammy websites. You may want to check to see if your site is blocking archive.org and if you have no legitimate reason for this, get the block removed.

Whilst neither of these two negative factors is enough to get your site Google slapped, it’s always sensible to follow best-practice guidelines as it may only take a few of these spam indicators to push your site from one that is ranking well to one that is never seen in the search results again.

On that topic, another comment was made, regarding domains that have been banned from the search results – that it may be easier to write it off and start again. It looks like Google engineers may not be able/want to sift through websites that have been penalised, looking through on-page SEO and link quality, so re-inclusion requests may go unanswered. If you have been involved in black-hat practices then you might have more luck starting a new domain and trying again with a little less trickery.

This morning Google revealed that the new, faster search engine it has been working on, codenamed ‘Caffeine’, is almost ready to roll out.

The message on the web page where the Caffeine test system was live until a few hours ago reads:

"We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given."

If you didn’t have a chance to play around with the Caffeine system then here are the main things we found:

1. The system has been created to include more real-time results and search results pay more attention to social media sites than the existing Google system.

2. The look and feel hasn’t changed. Behind the scenes is where changes have been made, to speed up indexing and increase the relevance of search results.

3. The database which Google pulls on for search results is larger. Many more web pages have been indexed, so competition is greater for many keywords.

At Liberty, we have been testing the system quite extensively and can’t wait for it to be released. Many of the search results we monitor show a higher quality of website and pleasingly for a search engine marketing firm, many of our client’s websites are displayed a lot higher for many keywords than ever before.

The Lincoln House Hotel is a stylish and well respected bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Cardiff city centre. The management of the hotel approached Liberty Marketing in early 2009 looking to increase the number of enquiries and bookings, which had been falling since the start of the economic downturn. Together we agreed on an online marketing and search engine optimisation strategy which could be rolled out over the course of the year.
 
How did we improve their online marketing?
 
SEO advice & copywriting - The hotel was having a new website designed so we helped by advising on keywords to target and re-wrote elements of their site so that the chosen keywords were used in a stronger way.
 
Pay Per Click advertising - A small Pay Per Click advertising campaign was set up on the Google Adwords system to bring in quick traffic and enquiries at a low cost, while the SEO elements were being worked on.
 
Advertising advice & link building - We started reviewing other websites in the travel and accommodation industry to see which were worth advertising on and which would be useful to seek inbound links from. This was done so that the search engines take the site more seriously as well as to bring in quality traffic.

How has this helped the Lincoln House Hotel?
 
Online marketing has now become a core part of the hotel's marketing strategy. The search engines are paying attention to the site a lot more than before, with Google now showing it on the first page for keywords such as "bed and breakfast Cardiff", which it used to be on the 3rd page for. This has meant that website traffic has been rising month on month and the site now receives a few thousand visitors each month.
 
"We would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at Liberty Marketing Ltd for all the work you have done promoting our web site. During the deepest recession this country has ever had we have had an increase in enquiries and bookings and have maintained our turnover of previous years" - Kathy Howard, Lincoln House Hotel