Yahoo! has just announced that they have expanded the number of ad keywords a site may exclude to 250 terms, up from 20 exclusion terms previously. Yahoo’s Excluded Words act on context sensitive ads displayed in search results. These excluded words can be applied to ad groups and entire ad campaigns. Yahoo’s exclusion approach is not new. Google also provides the capability, which it terms “negative keywords.”

If you’re new to blog marketing, on the surface, excluding your site or blog from a search may seem counterintuitive. The approach is designed to help visitors make the most of search results. It also helps the site owner to better qualify traffic from PPC ads. For example, if your site sells children’s clothing, you want to discourage search traffic and ad placement for adult-sized clothes, work uniforms, formal wear or other terms that are related to clothing, but irrelevant to your purpose.

How can you create a list of exclusion terms? When you create or modify your list of keywords, you can also make a list of words that are related to your site, product or service, but that don’t apply directly. If you use keyword suggestion tools, scan the lists for terms that don’t apply to your site or your blog and use those as a starting point. Ultimately, you want to avoid having your PPC ads shown in situations that aren’t appropriate to the context in which they appear.

Google also adds a layer of refinement to the use of negative keywords, by allowing restrictions at the Ad Group level and also at the Campaign Level. If you place negative keyword restrictions on an ad group, all of the ads in the group will be suppressed for searches that include the negative keywords you’ve identified. If you place negative keyword restrictions on ads at the Campaign Level, all ads in the campaign will be suppressed for searches that contain the negative keywords you’ve identified. You can add negative keywords manually, or you can automatically include all ad group restrictions at the campaign level.

Tags: blog, Blog Marketing, campaigns, Google, hr, im, IT, keywords, marketing, ppc, PR, relevant, RSS, search, sse, traffic, XP, yahoo

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.