Yahoo and Google both have something called Quality Score. Yahoo gives a quality score to an ad group while Google gives quality score to an individual term as it is typed into Google in real time. When you set up your account you start off the same in Google and Yahoo. It is important to organize your keywords so that they are grouped by subject. Sometimes there will be keywords that seem to fit in 2 groups. You will just have to choose. There is no perfect way to do this but there are some rules to go by. The less keywords you have in each ad group the better. This does not mean one or two keywords per ad group or even less than 5. There are some ad groups that might just have 2 or 3 but for the most part you will have more.

The important thing is that when you write your ad you have the keywords that are in your ad group in it. This does not mean that every single keyword has to be in the ad it just needs to be close. It should be obvious if you see a group of words in an ad group if they need their own ad group.

In Yahoo you still have more work to do. You need to now split up your groups so that the higher CTR keywords are together. Put your head terms in a group and then split up your long tail keywords into 2 more groups. Put your low volume keywords in their own group and the rest in a middle volume group. Over time you will get more information and you will be moving some keywords around. You can keep the ad groups with the same name and just add –LV, -HV, -MV tacked onto the end.

When you set up your account only use standard match on most terms. When you do this you will not have the ability to use negative match. Yahoo just does not give you the control you have over at Google. If you just really want to use advanced match be careful and set up negative matches and watch your log files.

If you use Google Analytics you will need to set up Keyword URL tagging in yahoo so you can split your PPC data from your SEO data. The guys over at PPC Hero have a great write up on this.

There is a lot more to Yahoo and I will talk about that in another post.

This also works the other way to only show links from one site or links that contain other words like type in “directory” to find all sites that link to you and have the word “directory” on them. You can play around with the other advanced searches like intitle: inurl:. I like to try linkdomain:www.mysite.com inurl:”edu” to see if I have in .edu links.

The Long tail

to me is a phrase typed into a search engine that is 4 or more words. 3 words I consider medium tail. There are some 3 word phrases that are easy to get and some that are very hard. One of the things that goes with long tail is that most of the time you may only get 1 visitor a month or even one visitor from that term ever. I used to run some pretty busy spam sites that were auto generated from lots of keyword research. One of the things I would see in the logs was that over 50% of my traffic over a month period were from phrases that were only typed in once that month.

One of the armature mistakes that most SEO make is that the focus all their time and effort into ranking for what they think their “money word” is. People think “man if I could just rank for “auto loan” or “debt consolidation” I would be rich”. Yes you will get lots of traffic and make some good money but your conversion rate will suck. It will take a lot of time and effort to get those terms if you can even get them at all. You could spend your initial time and effort going after lots of smaller terms. The long tail terms have a much better conversion rate. Instead of “auto loan” you might go for “no money down auto loans”. If you know what you are doing and can get the big terms go for it. Once you get the big term most of the long tail will just happen. Problem is most people can’t get the big terms.

There are lots of ways to get your terms. Wordtracker is a great place to start. Also it is worth it to invest in some PPC. You will lose money on this but the keyword list it will give you will be worth it. Just make sure you have log files and a program to read them. You can also build your own keyword list. You already know the root phrases that are in your industry. I used MS Access to build keyword lists. Of course it is always good to have lists of cities, countries, zip codes, states, and neighborhoods.