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LiveBall Search Engine Savvy

End-to-End Paid and Organic Search Engine Optimized Pages

Quality score — Google’s in particular — is a pretty important thing if you’re engaged in paid search engine marketing (SEM). LiveBall customers are some savvy search engine marketers. And LiveBall delivers quality scores that keep their bids competitive and their placements where they want them.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Features

  • Clean HTML Code
    There’s no clutter in LiveBall HTML. It’s clean, clear, compatible and standards-based to make it easy for search engines to read.
  • Fast Load Times
    Page speed makes a huge difference in how a page is scored. Fast pages score better than slow ones. LiveBall pages are fast to load — making them better for users and better for search engines.
  • Display URLs
    LiveBall URLs live on the domain name of your choosing or on a subdomain of your website’s domain. You can point as many domains or subdomains to your dedicated LiveBall IP address, ensuring that you can match your display URL to your domain name of choice.
  • Smart Flash Handling
    The proliferation of non-Flash devices means that pages must elegantly handle their display of Flash. If you choose to use Flash in your LiveBall pages, non-Flash devices will seamlessly see non-Flash content. Or, use LiveBall’s advanced rules to sense specific devices like the iPad and deliver optimized user experiences just for those people.
  • Keyword Passing
    Pass your keywords into LiveBall to personalize your user experiences with content and keyword substitution. See real-time keyword clouds to know at a glance which keywords lead to conversion and which ones don’t.
  • Matched Content
    LiveBall makes it fast and easy to match your landing pages to your ads and keywords. This has a huge impact on quality score. The more relevant your pages are, the higher their quality scores will be.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features

Since its debut in 2007 LiveBall has been the ultimate campaign landing page platform. With it, marketers have launched and optimized millions of landing pages, microsites and conversion paths for paid search, email marketing, social marketing and advertising. LiveBall is also the ultimate organic landing page platform.

LiveBall’s state-of-the-art SEO features give organic optimizers ultimate control over the things that matter most.

  • SEO- and Analytics-Friendly URLs
    LiveBall creates SEO and analytics-friendly .html URLs without query string parameters. Plain-language paths can be optionally customized by traffic source, landing experience and page. Include your keywords to make your SEO URLs as strong as possible. LiveBall URLs are search engine, analytics and user friendly.
  • Robots Controls
    Many online marketers like to specify which pages may be indexed by search engines. Temporary pages probably shouldn’t end up in organic results, while more permanent ones should. LiveBall enables marketers to direct search engine spiders for each landing experience. Set directives for noindex, nofollow and noarchive at your discretion.
  • Canonical URLs
    For expert SEO practitioners who want to minimize duplicate content issues, any page in a LiveBall landing experience can optionally point to a “Canonical URL”. A canonical URL tells search engines to look to that URL for the “official, indexable” version of the content on a particular page. This minimizes search engine duplicate content issues that can arise when testing alternative versions of pages.
  • SEO-Specific Content
    Each LiveBall traffic source can include SEO-specific creative. This feature lets marketers treat the search engines differently than the real humans. While first-time human visitors that go to a LiveBall URL may get randomly assigned to a landing experience within a test group, search engine robots can be directed to spider a more stable SEO version of the content. Like the cononical URL feature above, this addresses potential duplicate content issues and gives marketers more control.
  • Automatic XML Sitemaps
    Search engines love XML sitemaps. If you want search engines to discover a certain set of your landing pages, the best way to achieve that is to include them in your XML sitemap. LiveBall automatically generates a sitemap.xml file for each domain (you can turn it off for specific domains if you want to). Each LiveBall traffic source that includes an ‘SEO Path’ will be automatically included in your sitemap. Like everything in LiveBall, you can override it to behave exactly as you want it to. You can always or never include a traffic source in your sitemap and you can set a traffic source’s relative priority — to let the search engines know what’s most important for them to index. And LiveBall automatically updates the ‘last modified’ stamp in the sitemap to let the search engines know when you’ve got new content for them.
  • Query String Control
    If, for whatever reason, you append query string parameters onto your LiveBall URL, LiveBall automatically saves them and passes them along to subsequent pages or systems. In some cases, you may want query string parameters to be saved, but not passed along. LiveBall makes it easy for you to make this distinction and further optimize your landing experiences for the search engines. Query string parameters will still be stored and saved for later use or export, but your URL will end in .html.
  • Robots.txt
    LiveBall automatically generates a robots.txt file for every domain and points to the sitemap.xml file. In addition to being specified at the landing experience level as explained above in feature two, noindex/nofollow preferences can be set on a domain basis and include any custom directives in the robot.txt file.
  • 301 Redirects
    When a LiveBall traffic source is closed it can optionally be set to use a permanent (301) redirect to send the traffic and ‘link juice’ somewhere else. This is a good idea when you’re sure that content has permanently moved. If you think you may re-open the traffic source or extend its expiration, use a temporary (302) redirect. Either way, it’s a simple checkbox control.
  • Ping Search Engines
    Search engines will discover new content on LiveBall pages by checking the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files that are automatically generated. However, to give search engines a heads up that new content is available, you can ‘ping’ the search engines — inviting them to revisit the sitemap.xml for recently added content. Just click and LiveBall will notify the search engines that you have new content in your sitemap.xml.