What now !?

I haven’t been posting in a long while now, so I thought to write a few lines and share some things I’ve been doing:

- I visited USA, which was a big to-do on my list; I was in Philadelphia and New York… it was really impressive and I definitely want to go again !

- I took some time off and played a few games like the Tales of Monkey Island (the first 4 episodes) and Machinarium;

- I saw a few series from Dr House, which is one of my favorite TV series

- I planned a few projects at work

- I found a few ideas for different web projects and then took them apart when adding the money factor into the equation

- I plan to develop a structure and CMS over the Zend Framework, with which to easily build websites and web applications

- I plan to learn Flex and Actionscript 3

- I learned a few things about Objective C 2.0 and the Cocoa API and was preety impressed after succeeding in creating a simple application in a mere 6 hours timeframe (during one night )

- As always I want to take some certifications, like the Zend Framework Certified Engineer and maybe the Certified Mysql Developer certification, although I’m not sure about the last one since it’s more expensive at the moment and not really used in recruiting.

I guess we’ll see what happens next! I’ll keep you posted!

Google Adwords landing page optimization tips

If you have been using Google Adwords you know how hard it is sometimes to rank high and pay low for certain keywords/keyphrases in certain niches.

Below you will find a list of Adwords optimization tips that will insure a high quality score of your Adwords landing pages. Just follow the tips below into implementing your landing sites and landing pages and you will definitely see Quality Score improvements:

1. Segment your keywords into similar and logical groups
2. Target each group of keywords to an individual landing page
3. Put the keywords into the page’s TITLE, H1, H2 tags, get a keyword density (for the targeted keyphrase) of around 2% in the page’s body and create links to and from the page, containing the keyphrase in the anchor text and title
4. Create a Privacy page, containing actual privacy policy text, taken from a similar website (with their permission of course) or generated with one of the many available privacy generators and link to it from all of the site’s pages
5. Create at least 3 pages with somewhat related content, but be careful not to copy full blocks of text in it, in order to not raise any duplicate content flags; from these pages link to your landing page, using the targeted keyphrase as anchor text (use 1-3 links, only slightly varying the anchor text of the links, or using similar keywords)
6. Create a Contact page, and link to it from all of the site’s pages; you can nofollow the links to the contact page, and be sure to add real contact information (if you want to keep your identity private, choose a name for yourself and open a free webmail account and a skype account)
7. Google loves links to authority websites, so be sure to create 2-3 links on the landing pages to a related topic on Wikipedia or a similar product on Amazon or something else like this
8. Create a sitemap of your website using a free sitemap generator and upload it to your site
9. Nothing good will come from adding your domain/website into Google Webmaster Tools, so DON’T! Instead ping Google with your landing site’s sitemap
10. Wait for your landing page to get indexed into Google organic results and then fire up your Adwords campaigns !

That’s about it ! Now you should pay less and get more traffic from your Google Adwords efforts.

One very important thing to emphasize here is that numbers 9 and 10 from the above list do not seem obvious at first, not many people recommend them, Google states that paid listings are not influenced by organic results and yet implementing #9 and #10 makes a BIG DIFFERENCE!

Google Advertising Professionals Program migration

Google is migrating all of our GAP data from our MCC accounts to the new

Adwords Professionals pages

You can basically access the same data you had in the MCC account, but you can also add and/or manage other GAP professionals linked to your account.

I’m guessing this is the first step into raising the awareness of the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) certification.

Also this could lead into a community (or social network) of GAP professionals looking for work or giving advice and clients seeking what GAPs have to offer…