As the importance of online marketing campaigns grow, users find themselves with endless tools at their disposal. A recent article from Yoast outlined the some of the best tools available today. Here are just a few of their highlights:

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is constantly adding new features that can help you enhance your SEO and SEM campaigns. The service helps you track the number of visitors, clicks, Adwords spend, and more on your businesses’ website. You can also use it to track the effectiveness of certain elements that change over time including email blasts and advertisements.

Clicktale – Clicktale takes website tracking up a notch by providing you with an actual video of customers surfing on your site. You can see your site’s “hot spots” and “cold spots” by seeing exactly where your customers click. It also shows you when readers don’t particularly like certain content and hit the “back button.”

Google Website Optimizer – For split-testing, check out Google Website Optimizer. The tool lets you test multiple versions of a page to see which version gets more clicks and closes more sales. You can test several pages of your website at once and generate a report that shows the results of the testing.

These three tools will give you a great start in enhancing your online marketing campaign. For even more ideas, check out Yoast’s article called, “Tools to Improve Your Online Marketing Campaign”

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It’s a common misconception among marketing and advertising professionals that writing PPC advertisements is easy – after all, there are boundaries under which to work, like a strict text length. A recent post on Deep Foot Prints, however, claims it may not be that straight forward. Here are a few tips to help you create successful PPC advertisements for your business:

Understand the business you’re writing for – If you’re not writing for your own business, spend time getting to know the business you’re writing for. Talk with key decision makers, learn about their products and services, speak with a customer services manager, research the target demographic and main competitor, and more.

Maintain a clear theme – Ensure your ad groups are closely aligned to one another. To do this, try for no more than 20 to 30 keywords per ad group, and aim your ads to only certain pages on the website.

Write a Strong Ad Headline – The headline if your hook and the biggest attention grabber. Fail here and there’s no turning it around. With only 25 characters, you have to make each character count. It’s usually a good idea to use a keyword here and use questions to entice the reader into looking at your ad.

Write Strong Descriptions – this part of the ad allows you to include more detail than the headline. You’ll want to tie this into the headline. So, if you asked a question in your headline, you’ll want to use the description to either answer the question or insert a call-to-action.

Create an attractive display URL – This is often overlooked when creating an ad, and that’s simply a wasted opportunity. The display URL needs to contain the same domain as the domain in the ad/keyword destination URL, so the shorter your domain, the higher your freedom. Try using the core keyword or the name of your current promotion.

These tips and more can be found in the Deep Foot Print’s article titled, How to Write the Best PPC Adverts.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any great tips for writing killer PPC ads? If so, please join the conversation and comment below.

As the New Year rolls in, you’ve probably see plenty of predictions about what’s ahead in marketing, social media, and more. But, have you heard anything about link building? In a recent article on Search Engine Journal, the author outlined some things that may change during 2011, here are some highlights:

image via Ian Sane

1. More links to content – Instead of solely focusing on your homepage or product page, begin linking to more of your internal pages. Content marketing is growing quickly – so make sure you move along with it.
2. Less use of keyword-based anchor text – As concern about penalization for over-optimized anchor text grows, the need for new anchor text has risen. Instead of continually targeting your keyword phrases, consider using your target brand or business name as anchor text. This can also help with your online reputation, since review sites are increasing in popularity.
3. Quality over quantity – Focus on high-quality linking opportunities instead of getting many links on low-quality sites. As experts are learning more and more about users’ link building strategies, these low-quality sites may disappear, thus causing you to lose those links.
4. The importance of social media – Several recent articles have shown that search engine rankings are being influenced by social mentions like Twitter and Facebook. Although these sites used to be useless when it came to SEO, they’re now being counted for relevance.

For even more link building predictions, check out Search Engine Journal’s article titled, “5 Link Building Predictions For 2011.”