What are negative keywords, how do they work, and what are the benefits of using them?

If you are running a pay-per-click campaign, you may have heard about negative keywords. The use of a negative keyword list is very useful in filtering out unwanted traffic.  

You might want to use negative keywords if:

• You have zero conversions
• You have expensive conversions
• You have a limited budget
• You experience bad brand association
• You seek quality improvements
• You would like to lower your PPC costs 

What are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are a list of keyword or keyword phrases that help prevent your ad from being displayed to an unwanted audience for your PPC campaign. By doing so, you can keep your ad from showing up in unrelated searches that drive little to no quality traffic. This also helps you keep PPC costs down.

Let's say you sell high-end road bikes in Denver, CO. To keep your ads from showing up for people looking for "cheap" or "free" road bikes, you would add those keywords to your negative keyword list. So you simply identify the modifiers or adjectives that would cause your ads to trigger for undesirable traffic.

Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match

Before we move on, let's take a closer look at how broad, phrase, and exact match work. Let's start with the word "tennis racquet." If you use broad match with your campaign, then any keyword that has any of those variations will trigger your ad like these below.

When you use phrase match, any keyword phrase that uses words before and after "tennis racquet" will trigger your ads. If you switch to exact match, then your ads will only be served up if a searcher types in "tennis racquet."

It's important to see this difference so you can better understand how negative keywords will help you. If you use exact match, then you really don't need to use negative keywords. You only need them for broad match and phrase match.

Broad Match	"Phrase Match"	[Exact Match]
tennis	graphite tennis racquet	tennis racquet
racquet	tennis racquet
buy tennis racquet	buy tennis racquet
tennis racquet photos
tennis balls

Benefits of Using Negative Keywords

There are many benefits to employing a negative keyword list. You can probably guess many of them by now. Let's look at the effect of negative keywords on Quality Score, conversions, and leads, and the visitor experience.

Quality Score

• Quality Score - increase
• Ad position - increase
• Max cost per click (CPC) - decrease

Conversion/Leads

• Conversion rate - increase
• Qualified leads - increase
• Cost per conversion - decrease
• Profit - increase

Visitor Experience

• Relevancy - increase
• Bounce rate - decrease
• Brand association - increase
• Conversion rate - increase

Negative Keyword Tools

There are many tools available to help you identify negative keywords. Some keyword tools have a negative keyword tool built in, so check for that and try it out. They also should have the ability to check for synonyms. You can also just use a thesaurus. If you are using the Google Keyword Tool, paste your website URL into the "website content" box and check the results. It will show you keywords that come up and if any are undesirable, then add them to your negative keyword list. You may also want to change your copy on your site to reflect only your targeted keywords. This will help you with your SEO as well.

You can also use your website analytics tool. Check to see what keywords were used to find your site. Also, look at your monthly keyword report for keywords to add to your negative keyword list.

Your PPC campaign reports will hold some valuable information. Look specifically at the "search query performance report." This will show you keywords that triggered your ads so you can identify where to make adjustments.

If you are running a PPC campaign and not using a negative keyword list, I highly recommend you do. It will benefit you in many ways.

Link Farming

Link farming is a questionable search engine optimization (SEO) tactic in which a website enters a relationship of reciprocal linking with another site or pays a provider for a large number of inbound links. Because many search engines use inbound links as a factor in determining a website's page rank, websites use link farming to boost their rankings in search engine results.

A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) created only for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links. A link farm usually looks like a regular web page, but the majority of the content is hyperlinks -- often random and unrelated -- to other websites. 

Link farms can be advertised as services to build up your content. They are often set up by creating a network -- one that is often created with the sole purpose of gathering a number of locations from which to point at a website. Because Google dislikes links between unrelated sites, some link farms divide their links into categories or a directory.

Link farms were originated in response to Google's ranking algorithm, PageRank. PageRank thinks of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote. Therefore, pages with the most links were deemed valuable. Link farms were created to help increase PageRank, however, in recent times, Google and other search engines have adapted their algorithms to prevent link farms from appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Web sites that have created link farms can be penalized by Google and other search engines.

Link farming is considered a "black hat" method of search engine optimization (SEO) because the content on the web sites linking to each other is often not related, not created by a human (it can be created using programs or services) and is often of a very low quality. Search engines can detect link farms easily and they shouldn't be seen as a legitimate long-term search optimization strategy.

Now, link farming often fails because search engines have evolved to rank results based on what will be most useful for the user. This means that a link from a site with trusted content or similar content to the page to which it is linking is worth more than random links from many sites.

In essence, search engines attempt to encourage websites to gain authority – and thus page rank – in the most legitimate way possible. The ideal way to gain page rank is to create websites with great content that will be frequently linked to by other high-quality sites.

Google AdWords and Benifits of Advertising with Google Adwords

Google Adwords is the system Google has developed to assist you in marketing your products or services in the Google Search Engine, and its affiliate sites, via the use of a placed text ad that appears when people search for phrases related to your offering, this appears as a “sponsored link”.

 

The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click the ads. The ad service is largely focused on keywords.

Businesses that use Adwords can create relevant ads using keywords that people who search the Web using the Google search engine would use. The keyword, when searched for triggers your ad to be shown. Adwords at the top ads that appear under the heading "Sponsored Links" found on the right-hand side or above Google search results. If your Adwords ad is clicked on, Google search users are then directed to your website.

When choosing keywords for your Adwords campaigns different matching options are available. The two main keyword match options include the following:

Broad Match: This reaches the most users by showing your ad whenever your keyword is searched for.

Negative Match: This option prevents your ad from showing when a word or phrase you specify is searched for.

Phrase Match: Your ad is shown for searches that match the exact phrase.

Exact Match: Your ad is shown for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively.

When using Adwords keywords are also used to determine your cost of advertising. Each keyword you choose will have a cost per click (CPC) bid amount. The bids specify the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad (the maximum cost-per-click). A higher CPC bid can allow your ad to show at a higher position on the page.

Benefits of advertising with Google AdWords

A few important things set AdWords apart from other kinds of advertising. Using AdWords, you can:

1. Reach people at the precise moment they’re searching for what you offer

• Your ad is displayed to people who are already searching for the kinds of products and services you offer. So those people are more likely to take action.
• You can choose where your ad appears -- on which specific websites and in which geographical areas (states, towns, or even neighborhoods).
• The Google Display Network (GDN) alone reaches 80% of Internet users in the US.

2. Control your budget

• With cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, you’re charged only when someone clicks your ad, not when your ad appears. There are a variety of bidding options you can choose from.
• You decide how much or little you want to spend monthly, and you’ll never be charged more than that amount.
• There’s no minimum spending commitment.

3. See exactly what's working in your ad, and build on it

• View a report of how your ad is doing -- see how many new customers connect to your business from your ad, where they’re coming from, and more.
• Use AdWords tools to edit and improve your ad, and increase the number of potential customers who contact your business.

Google Sandbox in Search Engine Optimization

One of the biggest topics of conversation in the SEO world at the minute is the Google ‘Sandbox’.  

Definition: The Google sandbox or “sandbox effect” refers to a commonly held belief that Google has a filter that places all new websites under restrictions for a certain amount of time to prevent them from ranking in searches. The idea behind the Google sandbox is that newer websites are not as relevant as older sites, and they are also more likely to be spam. For this reason, they are restricted and allowed to mature before being allowed to rank well, much as a young child is placed to play in a sandbox by his or her caregiver. Although Google will neither confirm nor deny the existence of the sandbox, it is widely accepted as fact.

Websites can be in the Google sandbox for varying amounts of time, generally six months to a year. It is extremely difficult to avoid having a brand new domain being placed in the sandbox.

The filter exists to prevent SEOs and spammers from easily manipulating search results by satisfying all of Google’s major offsite and onsite factors.

Signs of the sandbox include: 

• The website is outranked for clearly navigational queries (the name of the website with exclusion of www. and .com, for example “yourwebsite”).
• Pages do not rank for exact title matches.
• The website ranks well for competitive queries and then drops into no man’s land to page 100+ of the SERPs, or does not show for targeted keywords at all.
• Site ranks well in Yahoo/Live, but not Google. 

There is an important difference between the sandbox and deletion from Google’s search results. While the sandbox and a Google ban can seem to be very similar, they are not. The sandbox is a filter (or so SEOs say) used by Google to prevent new websites from taking top spots on search results, while a Google ban is a complete exclusion of the website from the search results. To find out whether your website was banned or was placed in the sandbox, simply search using the following command: 

Site: www.yourwebsite.com 

If Google shows pages from your website, it means you were sandboxed. 

If you get the following message: “Your search – site:www.yourwebsite.com – did not match any documents.” – then you’re banned. If you’ve been banned, contact Google with an inclusion request, but make sure to clear out all the elements that might have caused you to get banned first. 

Prepare for Leaving the Sandbox

If the sandboxing is affecting your website, don't just sit back and complain. The effect of the Sandbox filter will reduce in time and in the meantime, you should be working on your website to ensure that when you are out of the sandbox, your website is optimized and ready to feature high in the SERPs.