The following is a reference guide meant to provide an overview of the essential pieces of paid search advertising, as well as some basic strategies and tools to get anyone new to the game off on the right foot. If you were to take a PPC 101 class, consider this the “Cliffs Notes” you’d really want to get your hands on ahead of time. They won’t get you through the class by themselves, but they will certainly make your life much easier.

Please click the links below to expand each section.

Quality Scores

Ad Rank

Ad Position

Match Types

Ad Copy

Keyword Bids

Linking AdWords to Google Analytics

Networks (Google)

Alternative networks

Negative Keywords

Search Term Reports

Tagging (Auto and Manual)

Targeting

Ad Extensions

Tiered Bidding

Automatic Bidding

Ad Scheduling with Bid Adjustments

Segmentation

Tools (AdWords Editor, AdCenter Desktop)

SEO Tools

MSN Intelligence

AdGooroo

Double Click Search

Marin

KenShoo

This was a fairly comprehensive overview of the essentials of paid search and we hope that this information gets you on the path to successful PPC optimization.

If you feel that we’ve omitted anything truly valuable, email us three suggestions for additional entries and we will send you a free t-shirt.

#1: Preconference Discussion

Managers should meet with conference, workshop, and meeting participants prior to the event.  This single step shows manager interest in the employee and the event.  It also provides an opportunity to ensure the employee will receive the maximum impact from the event by attending the most relevant and impactful meetings and workshops.  Managers should look to provide input and encourage their employees to engage with speakers and other notable participants at the conference.  The manager and employee should also discuss the desired impact/return for the meeting.  Will participating enhance the ability of the employee to do their job?  How will this provide skills or information needed to evolve within the company?  How will participation in the conference impact the employee or the company?  How will you distribute relevant information to the company?  If these questions are difficult to answer, participation might not be as valuable as you initially conceived.

#2: Be There, Virtually

Employees are often sent to industry conferences, workshops, and meetings with little direction (see #1, above), and as a result, they are left to fend for themselves.  Even with a plan in place, the employee (especially if they’re not conference, meeting or workshop regulars) may be intimidated by the scale of the event.  This anxiety can significantly impact their active participation and interaction during the meeting.  Managers should actively engage with their employee during the meeting, perhaps asking about a particular meeting or to encourage they interact with a particular industry personality.  The interaction could even be more casual, like a restaurant recommendation for the evening.  Through these types of interactions, manager interest can help spark active participation and dialogue, while helping to alleviate any anxiety the employee might feel by being “on their own”.

#3: Conference Follow-up

Once the meeting participant returns, it is essential for the manager and employee to meet to debrief.  This meeting should happen no later than 2 days after the event to take advantage of their excitement and ensure recollection is clear.  The meeting participant should provide a summary of the events attended, topics discussed and hot topics they’d like to pursue.  Both should look for content to distribute to relevant members of the company and effective methods for disseminating the information.

What Do You Recommend?

In the end, it’s all about the manager showing an interest and actively engaging with their employee before, during and after industry events.  Do you have any other tips for maximizing industry conference impact?  Please leave them in the comments below!

I would like to highlight 3 different changes that Google has made which will impact your search results and online marketing strategy going forward:

1. The Above the Fold Landscape
2. Not Provided Results
3. Over Optimization Penalties

The Above the Fold Landscape

Search marketers will frequently talk about ensuring that their ads are seen above the fold. The theory is that Search ads will be beneficial if they are seen without needing the searcher to scroll down the SERP to see an ad. There is a direct correlation between your ads position and the click through rate for that ad.

Take a look at this chart – Slingshot SEO recently published a study which illustrates this point. As you can see, the higher your Organic position, the higher your CTR will be.

As I mentioned, Google has an invested interest in having its customers click on paid ads. The smart folks at Google are armed with a ton of data that allows them to adjust their business model to ensure that they continue to meet their profitability goals. Take a look at the SERP for the keyword “mattress”. This screenshot represents the above the fold SERP. As you can see, there are 6 individual ads to choose from:

• 3 Paid Search Ads
• 2 Paid Product Listings
• 1 Organic (SEO) Ad

In the past, a SERP might have had 6 or more Organic listings above the fold. The consequence of these changes result in an increased strategic importance for being in the top 3 paid ads as well as having the top ranked organic listing. I am guessing that there are thousands of companies which would love to have customers looking for mattresses and finding them via the search engines.

So, what next? What adjustments do you need to make to your online marketing strategy to make sure that you have coverage in one of these highly coveted spots?

For Paid Search, we might consider adjusting your bidding strategy or improving your Quality Scores. Bidding more is not always the best answer, as we need to make sure that the strategy is profitable. Marketers’ goals will need to be clearly defined in order to meet or exceed them. These goals should allow your PPC team to set appropriate bids which will result in positive ROAS/CPL results.

SEO will be a bit trickier. At Rise Interactive, we often talk about the probability of success. Our SEO team has created a metric called the Rise Optimization Score. This metric provides us with a method for comparing the keywords as a basis for setting overall strategy. Landing in position 1 for Organic Search is often difficult, as competition is high. We suggest focusing on the following as a starting point:

• Excellent original content
• On-site SEO strategy
• Quality Backlinks

Why do we need to have an integrated online marketing strategy? Good question! Well, we need to understand how important it is to have coverage above the fold for a specific keyword. We will most likely need to adjust our strategy to make sure that we have coverage. (Coverage tells you the amount of times your ad will show up for a given amount of searches). We might choose to peg our PPC ad to one of the top 3 positions until our SEO ranking improves. We might also decide that being in the top 3 paid positions does not allow us to reach our ROAS or CPL goals. Clearly, an integrated Paid Search and SEO strategy is crucial in order to keep up with the changes that Google has made to the SERP. At Rise, we constantly work to understand our client’s goals and then adjust our strategy to reach and exceed them. We understand the importance of being above the fold and how to implement these strategies for success.

Not Provided Results

When was the last time that you logged into your Google Analytics (GA) account? For that matter, did you notice anything strange about your Organic results? Google has changed the way that it reports certain organic traffic data. In what I believe is an effort to appease lawmakers and reduce the importance of SEO, Google has decided to limit the granularity of the data that they report. Take a look at this screenshot taken from a GA account.

Anyone using Google who is logged into their Google account will be reported in the (not provided) bucket of visitors. What does this mean for the online marketer? Well, we will no longer be able to see keyword data for search queries performed by logged in users. Once again, this will reduce the insight into Organic search campaigns. Paid Search data will not be affected by this change as we will still be able to see all of the data via Google Adwords – this is another way that Google is influencing its advertisers to focus on Paid Search.

Over Optimization Penalties (SEO)

Google recently announced its intention to penalize companies who over optimize their websites for SEO. What is Over Optimization? Search Engine Optimizers are always looking for ways to have their sites rank highly for certain keywords. SEO’s, as they are called, try to figure out what inputs Google uses in its organic search algorithm. Once they have an idea of the inputs, the SEO’s will manipulate onsite content and offsite backlinks in order for Google to rank them highly. Google understands this so-called game that is being played. The idea is for Google to reward sites that have great content that people want to read. That being said, Google is looking for sites that are gaming the system and not providing high quality content. The following is a short list of over optimizations that “black hatter” SEO’s might try to manipulate to increase rankings:

• Promotion of non-relevant content
• Irrelevant backlinks
• Paid Links

While these changes benefit websites who provide great content and user experience, it is another subtle example of how Google is placing increased focus on paid search. If companies cannot rely on organic conversions, they might turn to PPC as an alternative. This leads back to my earlier point of the importance of a holistic online marketing strategy. Directors of search marketing will need to consider adding budget to ensure that their highest yielding keywords have enough budget to consistently be featured in the top 3 positions. In addition, SEO budgets will need to reflect the increased importance and competition for the number 1 rank for targeted keywords.

It is no secret that the advertising industry is growing at a rapid pace, where creative juice flow and proprietary tools and new forms of media are plentiful.  With all the new and emerging media, it is becoming more and more difficult for CMOs to decide how to appropriately allocate their marketing budget.  By analyzing the past, learning from the present, and planning for the future, you can gain valuable insight into the world of advertising.

We all know the story – in the early days, Print was king.  Then TV started to gain traction, and eventually surpassed print as the number one advertising medium with its unparalleled reach, generating 100x as many impressions with 1 TV ad compared to a magazine or newspaper ad.  Fast-forward to 2004…and online ad spending started gaining ground. According to eMarketer, between 2009 and 2010, the online advertising industry saw an increase in media spend of about 19%, and that was just the beginning.  Between 2010 and 2011, online advertising spend increased 24%, and another 23% into 2012.  These sharp increases in spend show that online advertising dollars will actually surpass print dollars this year.

eMarketer has also put out projections for the advertising industry broken down by medium type for the next 3 years.  While they provide estimated dollar numbers, I thought the percentage difference breakdown between years was much more representative of the trend.  While online spending increases at a rapid rate and then starts to increase at a slower rate, print spending is actually decreasing every year.  Both TV and radio are increasing, as well; however, they are increasing at a much slower and lower rate compared to online spending.

The following graph depicts media spending in dollars over the next 3 years.

If this isn’t clear enough of a picture, I don’t know what is.  All advertising mediums are either remaining stagnant, growing at a very slow rate, or are actually decreasing – all except for one: online.  With such explosive growth rates, of course online media spending won’t be able to sustain these rates; however, it is still growing at a much, much, more rapid rate than all other types of media, and with good reason.

As I said before, TV has the greatest reach by far as compared to all other media.  However, is it the most effective? What online advertising has that TV advertising does not is the ability to precisely calculate ROI for specific marketing initiatives and the ability to accurately target extremely refined segments.  Plus, every day, there is some new technology coming out to help people bypass commercials.  So, is online advertising the most effective?  Well, the answer is no.  No single medium will ever be the most effective.  Depending on what your marketing goals are, you may see more impact in certain channels than others.  However, one thing is certain: No company can be successful by investing in just one form of media.  Companies that allocate budget in a smart way and identify industry trends that correspond to business goals are the ones that will thrive.

Brand North Star

This is not simply a slogan or a jingle, but the soul of your brand.  Your brand North Star should be concise (six words or less), honest, strategic and inspirational.   Some great examples are: Oreo, Celebrate the Kid Inside;  Coca Cola, Open Happiness;  Mercedes Benz, The Best or Nothing.   This first step is perhaps creatively the most challenging, and will certainly define the rest of your brand journey.  I am particularly fond of Mercedes in how clear and uncompromising their Brand North Star is.

Brand Map

The brand map is where your day-to-day business aligns with your Brand North Star.  In the 20th Century, this was a one-way map in which brands created messages and used mass media to communicate to consumers.  In the 21st Century, your brand map must be updated to consider the multitude of touch-points and two-way interaction such as social and mobile.  Your map will include your brand’s actions, products and messages.  Actions in this context means key moments of truth in delivering on your brand North Star.  One example I will use, which also came from another Forrester Keynote (Global Brand Director, Coca Cola),  is Coca Cola’s Happiness Machine (www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqT_dPApj9U ).  It is very clear when you watch this that Coca Cola is focused on living up to its brand promise.  When I think of actions, I also think of employee interactions with customers and how critical each touch point is to leave a lasting impression of your brand.  Next is your product or service, and this too should be aligned with your actions.  And finally, so should your brand messaging.

Brand Compass

Your brand compass will guide your brand across 4 key pillars which will again create brand loyalty and garner a premium for your products and services.  The first is Trust, which can be defined as transparency and accountability.  An example of this is Hyundai offering a 10 year warranty versus the standard 5 year.  They literally put their money where their mouth is by leading the industry in extended warranty terms.  The next pillar is to be Remarkable by inspiring and disrupting.  A great example of this was the deodorant brand Secret creating an anti-bullying campaign which inspired 75,000 students to apologize to their classmates for bullying on Facebook.  The third pillar is to be unmistakable.  The example that was given here didn’t exactly work for me in that IBM has used a number of different icons to represent their North Star, “Solutions for a Smarter Planet.”  I didn’t immediately recognize these icons as being unmistakable. However, I love the concept of a brand living up to the ideal of being unmistakable.  I think a better example of a brand being unmistakable is Apple.  From their stores, to their commercials, to their print and outdoor campaigns, they use consistent themes and imagery where one immediately recognizes the brand. Lastly, a brand should be Essential (And wouldn’t this be great for all of our brands, having a product or service one could not live without.)  The example here that was given was again from Hyundai, talking about their promotion of consumers being able to return their car – no questions asked – if they lost their job.  While for some this might be essential in determining a purchase, I think a better example would be a company like Starbucks, where for some, no day is complete without a Grande Americano (or, in my case, a Frappuccino if I am really letting my hair down).

To reiterate, I found this to be a particularly clear and actionable framework that forces us to look closely at our brands and answer extremely difficult questions about what it takes to be a leading brand in the 21st Century.  It also motivates us to strive for some of the more challenging and thus, more valuable attributes of a brand, such as being unmistakable, and perhaps the most valuable attribute, being essential (customers cannot live without you).

It seems that as of late I find myself reading Talent Management literature with subject material related to alignment, engagement and performance reviews. While the entirety of my reading has been focused from the traditional employer/employee perspective, I have begun to ask what if the same principles were applied to the client/agency relationship. So much focus and research revolves around the concepts of talent management from the traditional HR perspective, and no one can really deny the effectiveness of a solid talent management approach. In fact, the Gallup Organization, one of the leading employee engagement practitioners, has found that engaged organizations have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to organizations with lower engagement in their same industry. But how does this apply to the management of a third party vendor?

An online survey compiled by CFO Research Services and Crowe Horwath LLP found that 60% of their respondents work regularly with third party vendors, with another 34% working with vendors on an as-needed basis.

It is clear that businesses are utilizing outside vendors more and more, many times for critical business functions. The collaboration with these parties is essential to the success of their business endeavors. “While survey respondents were upbeat about using outside partners, they were hardly naive when it came to understanding the vulnerability involved. In fact, 65% reported that their companies had suffered some harm when a third party did not meet expected quality or performance levels” says Josh Hyatt of CFO.com.

So the question becomes how do you get the quality and performance levels from your vendors you expect and on a regular basis? Well, how do you get the quality and performance levels you expect from your employees? The leading firms utilize talent management strategies and ultimately outperform their competitors. “Recent research suggests that firms receiving high scores in human capital management are more than twice as likely to be in the top one-third of their industry in financial performance compared to those who manage labor poorly.” states leading HR consultant, William Schiemann.  I contend certain talent management strategies if applied to a vendor relationship will not only meet your performance expectations but create an exponential impact and a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Three Vendor (Agency) Talent Management Tactics:
In this post, I will talk about three talent management tactics that I believe are essential to effectively manage your vendors / agency.

Alignment:
Schiemann defines alignment as the “extent to which employees are connected to or have a line of sight to the business strategy and goals.” This is extremely important for third party vendors as well. Most often vendors are not included in the communication of the client’s strategy or goals; the more communication the better the synchronization between the agency’s processes and resources to meet the client’s strategies and goals. When we as an agency completely understand the vision and strategy of our clients, it enables us to align all our assets and behaviors accordingly. We as an agency, just like an employee want to have a profound impact on the goals at hand, including us in the communication ensures that we fulfill our client’s expectations.

Engagement:
“Engagement is the extent to which employees are willing to go beyond the minimum requirements of their role to provide additional energy or to advocate for their organization” states Schiemann.  As a client – why wouldn’t you want this from your vendor? Imagine the benefits you as a client could reap from an agency that is fired up about your brand, products or services.  An engaged agency is involved and invested in the success of their clients. They live and breathe your brand.  Your problems become the agency’s challenge. But it is critical to foster that advocacy. Just like your employees we need to understand how we can grow and develop relative to your strategy.  We are energized and motivated by the recognition of our efforts, and we seek to be involved as a peer not as an outsider. We want to be a part of the success story. When you treat your agency like this – we become engaged and you as the client experience that benefit not only at the relational level but ideally at the bottom line. Gallup states that “organizations that have optimized engagement have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”

Performance Appraisals:
One of the cornerstones of any solid talent management program is the performance review.  To fully maximize your vendor relationship it is important to incorporate a vendor performance review on a regular basis.  In his book, One Page Talent Management, Mark Effron states that “the business reasons for performance management are quite simple: align the employee’s efforts with business needs and fairly evaluate the employee’s performance. “ An effective vendor performance review should  communicate to the agency just what the client considers to be important, concentrating on both the agency’s performance in the behaviors exhibited and the results obtained. More often than not, the vendor or the agency is kept in the dark relative to their performance or behaviors until it is too late.  However, just like an employee, an agency/vendor will perform better if they are given frequent feedback on how they are progressing. “The research is clear that if people are committed to a goal, they redirect (or redouble) efforts if they learn that they are not headed for success. Thus, feedback becomes a surefire way to increase the performance of any employee against any well-set goal. More frequent feedback shortens the performance improvement cycle, and actual improvement occurs faster” states Effron.  A vendor performance review is a methodical way for the agency to receive the appropriate feedback, and an important tool to drive alignment and results. Without it you will face the same issues as if you didn’t communicate to your employees, i.e. greater turnover, higher replacement costs, and ultimately disengagement.

Exponential Impact:
I truly believe if you follow this vendor management approach with your agencies, you will find a profound impact on your performance.  An aligned, engaged, and properly evaluated agency/vendor will have an exponential impact on your organization. They will begin to anticipate your needs at an accelerated rate and create and innovate based on your specific needs relative to their specialization. In essence, if managed properly, you should get your best ‘employee’ ever on steroids.  The added benefit is the multiplicative effect of the vendor relationship.  The scale of the relationship should be exponential and greater than any employee you could hire for the same role. Ultimately if you can foster this type of relationship with your agency/vendor, you will have a competitive advantage that is hard to replicate.

1. Do you have brick-and-mortar locations you want potential customers to find?
2. Does your vertical have a lot of location-based search queries?

If you answered yes to either question above, you have good reason to consider a local marketing program.  If you have brick-and-mortar stores, you definitely want all customers to be able to find your locations, hours, services and other related content.  The more locally customized the content (such as specials at a specific location or news from the neighborhood), the more engaging your local content will be.  In addition to local pages on your website, consider locally-focused paid search and display to enhance your local visibility.  To take this to another level, you could connect your local online efforts with offline direct mail strategies.

Even if your business operates on a national level only (such as mail order contacts), there could be reason for including a local marketing program.  While you might not have any local pages on your website, targeting people searching for “cheap contacts in Chicago” could be advantageous in improving your revenue.  If you find local searches driving significant revenue, you should consider creating regionally/locally-specific pages to provide the feeling of personalization for your customers.

What’s the Answer?

Simply put, if you have locations or customers performing location-based search queries, you should consider implementing a local strategy, whether it is geotargeted paid search, local display advertising, or creating local pages.  Do all you can to reach the customers trying to find you!
Thought question: Do you have a local marketing program?  Do you need one?

Question 1: What are your goals?
My mentor, Jack Kraft, always mentioned to me that if you do not know where you are going, every road will take you there.  He repeats this to me constantly to ensure that I have laser like focus and that success is clearly defined.  If you are a Director of Internet Marketing you should have the same focus.  You need to define success so that you are able to determine if you are spending your budget effectively.  There are three different goal types and the one that is most appropriate to you will depend on the type of site that you are managing:

• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS):  There are a few different ways to measure return on ad spend, but most companies take the revenue generated and divide it by total advertising spend (Revenue/Spend).  This goal type is generally used by e-commerce companies.  Lead generation companies could also optimize by return on ad spend if they are able to track performance to the customer rather than just the inquiry.
• Cost per Action: This goal type tends to be used for lead generation campaigns so that the company can determine the cost per lead for each channel.  The action though that you are measuring can range from a lead, to a newsletter signup.  Once you have defined the action that you wish to measure, then you can determine the cost per action by taking the media spend and dividing it by the number of actions acquired.
• Cost per Brand Metrics Conversion: The third goal type is for branded campaigns.  To calculate this, you will need to take your advertising spend  and divide it by your weighted brand metrics conversions.  To learn more about how we calculate brand metrics conversions, please read Rise’s Brand Metrics Calculator post.

What is crucial is that your goal is quantifiable so that you are able to compare your performance to this goal on an ongoing basis.  For example, if you manage the Internet marketing for an e-commerce site your ROAS goal might be $3.

Question 2: What is your budget?
Some of you reading this post might be wondering why one of my five questions is so basic.  There are actually a few reasons why I believe that this is a crucial question:

• You would actually be amazed at how many people I interact with that do not know their budget.
• More importantly, you will not be able to answer questions 3, 4 or 5 without knowing your budget.
• Additionally, many people only think about media spend and forget to incorporate creative costs, management fees, licensed application costs, payroll or any other cost that needs to be allocated to your Internet marketing program.

Question 3: How are you doing against your goals and budget?
Now that your goals and budget are defined, it is imperative that you know how you are doing relative to your goals and budget on an ongoing basis.  I recommend that you analyze your performance on a weekly and monthly basis at a minimum.  To get a more macro view you can also compare your performance relative to your goals on a quarterly or annual basis.  To determine how you are doing relative to your goals and budget I tend to use the report below:

This report actually answers the first three questions and provides a visual that is very easy to interpret. According to this report, our budget is $350k per month, our ROAS goal is $5.86 and our revenue goal is $2.05 million. Additionally, we can see how we did relative to the target budget, ROAS and revenue for each month in the first quarter of 2012. Based on the data from above, we achieved our overall ROAS goal and revenue goal in March 2012, but it took a few months to properly optimize. The success was mainly driven by our paid search program since our display program in this example was slightly below our targeted ROI.

Question 4: Why am I ahead or behind both my goals and budget?
Answering the first 3 questions should be fairly easy. It is understanding the “Why” that is behind the numbers that is challenging. For example, looking at the table above, we can determine that we achieved our targeted revenue in March overall because paid search exceeded our expectations. What we do not know though from the table above is why our performance in paid search improved. Or why Display was slightly below our expectations for March. In order to answer these questions, we are going to need more granular reporting for both paid search and display. For example, we would need to be able to analyze the performance on a keyword basis over time to understand what caused the paid search program to improve. The two tables below are sample keyword reports for February 2012 to March 2012. You will notice that the total cost, ROAS, and revenue match the table from above. This report though provides insight on how the budget is allocated at a keyword level. The big difference between the two months is that the budget was allocated substantially more efficiently in March 2012 versus February 2012. In February, only $47,987 was allocated to keyword 1 even though it had the highest ROAS. In March the total budget was basically the same, but $83,371 was allocated to keyword 1.

This is the type of granular reporting that is needed for all channels so that you can truly understand why you are ahead or behind goal.  Without the proper reporting  infrastructure, determining the “why” behind your campaigns performance can be extremely time consuming or even impossible to answer.

Question 5: What am I going to do about it?
Now that you know why you are ahead or behind your goals and budget, you need to determine the necessary action items to improve your ROI.  For example, for April 2012, I would want to see if I could allocate more budget to Keyword 1 since it has the greatest ROAS.  Additionally, the biggest difference between Keyword 1 versus the other key phrases is that it has a higher conversion rate.  Given that this is the case, I might want to look at the landing page experience from the other key phrases to see if I could improve the conversion rate for those key phrases.

Based on my years of managing Internet marketing campaigns, I feel very confident that if you can answer these 5 questions every week, your campaigns performance will continually improve.

Tip One: Don’t Post Sensitive Content

As evidenced by the recent outcry when Facebook made a series of semantic changes to clarify their Privacy Policy, Facebook users are very sensitive to their perceived privacy.  Users feel that their Facebook profile is theirs and they should have total control over who has access to the information and who doesn’t.  To put it simply, you don’t own your Facebook profile.  You are given rights to control the content posted, but in the end, your Facebook profile belongs to Facebook.  Their primary revenue model is based on matching advertisers with your interests to serve you with the most targeted advertising possible (serving users interested in video games with video game advertising instead of some random ad).

Facebook has given users many ways to control who has access to their content (lists are probably my favorite).  However, if you don’t want something out in the public space, don’t put it out there.  If you’re worried about people having your phone number and address, don’t put it on your Profile.  If you don’t want people knowing that you’re reading about Snookie’s weight loss, don’t use apps that publish that information.

Facebook is not off the Hook

I didn’t write this to absolve Facebook of any responsibility regarding privacy.  I do believe Facebook needs to continue to find ways to ensure users privacy.  My specific area of concern is third-party use of Facebook information.  Researchers from CMU recently showed that, using public Facebook information, you could identify a random individual on the street and gain access to sensitive information, even be relatively successful at guessing social security numbers through a previous-developed algorithm.  It is critical to the safety of Facebook users that Facebook continually take steps to ensure this type of malicious use of the platform is prevented.

Links to your site

The detailed link data that Webmaster Tools provides is incredible.  It’s by far the most accurate in terms of measuring total links, as well as where those links lead to.  It allows you to dive deeper into your data.  Knowing the total number of links is great…but that doesn’t tell you much in terms of your link profile diversity (becoming much more important as of recently), who you’re getting links from, or which pages they’re linked to.  Webmaster Tools outlines all of this—and more.  Use the link data to see who links to your site the most, what pages they are linking to, and what pages the links are coming from.  Not only does WT provide detailed data on external links, but it also provides data for internal links and linked pages.

Submit to Index

How many times have you gone to check your page and then realized you messed up the title tag or forgot to incorporate keywords throughout your content?  You type cache: in front of the URL to check when Google last indexed the page.  Doh! Google crawled the page yesterday! Just missed it.  You have to tweak the page just a little bit to move up a position in the rankings, so make the change, wait about a week or so for Google to come crawl it & register the change, and then you finally get to look for results.  A week? Who wants to wait an entire week to see what effect your tweaks made?

Webmaster Tools solves this problem.  With WT, you can personally tell the little Google crawler to come back to the page and crawl it.  After submitting to index manually, it usually takes about 24-48 hours for Google to crawl it, but the page will get re-crawled and re-indexed as you tell it to.  However, be careful with how many pages you send the crawler to….you can manually crawl 10 pages per month (this method updates the page and all linking pages), or you can manually submit 50 pages per month (this method updates just the page and not any linking pages).

Crawl errors/HTML suggestions

SEOmoz provides a great sample of html errors including 404 errors, 500 errors, missing titles, duplicate page content, and duplicate page titles.  However, the data is just that – a sample.  Webmaster Tools by far provides the best and most accurate measure of URL errors.  The new crawl errors user interface allows webmasters to view errors based on type (whether it be server error, 404 error, soft 404 error, blocked by robots.txt, etc), gives the date the error was detected, and the category (code) of the error.  It also gives you the option to mark errors as fixed if you would like to keep track before Google indexes the redirects.

Another new feature of the new UI for crawl errors shows the top 1,000 errors for each error code based on what Google deems the most pressing to fix. That way, for a site with tons and tons of problems, webmasters can manageably take action without having to fix tens of thousands of errors.

Like SEOmoz, Webmaster Tools also provides data on meta description errors, title tag errors, and non-indexable content.

Overall, Google Webmaster Tools is the most accurate tool in terms of links, linking domains, and html errors.  The data and insights that can be pulled from WT are unparalleled, and any webmaster hoping to increase their site’s performance can’t do so without registering for Webmaster Tools.  So if you’re one of the millions of webmasters who aren’t registered with WT, do it now! It takes no time at all, and the benefits are endless.