December 31, 2010

AdWords Tips: All About Keywords

As you probably know, Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing system, which is a great way to get traffic to your site. But if you don't know the ins and outs, it can end up costing you a lot of money and not making you any.

So, what's the key to success with AdWords? Well, I wish I could tell you there were one or two simple tricks, but the fact is, the best way to ensure success with AdWords is to be familiar with every aspect of the system. This will likely take weeks or months of research, plus a few bucks spent testing out a real AdWords account. However, you can greatly increase your chances by following this bit of advice: don't skimp on the keyword research!

Maybe you had it in your head that you could go through your site, grab 20 or 30 words or phrases, load them into an ad group, and you'd be watching the traffic and sales pour in. This is simply not the case. Keyword research should be the most time-consuming part of setting up any campaign; not only that, but you should be doing it all the time. That's right - never stop building your keyword list. Okay, now let me explain a few things:

First, you need to understand how Google uses your keywords to show your ads. You place a bid that determines your maximum cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. This can be different for every single keyword, if you wish. This bid does not represent the amount you'll pay for each click (like on Overture); this is just the maximum you'll ever pay for any single click. For example, if you have a max CPC of $0.50 set for a keyword, you'll only have to pay the full amount if someone else bids $0.49. If that person decides to lower his bid to $0.30, you'll only pay $0.31. This is because Google's bid discounter only charges you one cent more than the next highest bidder, no matter what your max CPC is. Theoretically, then, you could bid $10 or even $100 and still only pay $0.31 for a click.

But that's not all! As you start getting impressions (i.e., your ad shows up in the search results) and clicks, you'll have a click-through rate (CTR). This represents the number of clicks you receive per 100 impressions. Here's the really beautiful thing about AdWords: the higher your CTR, the lower your click cost. Because Google values relevance, you'll receive a bonus for having a relevant ad, and CTR is the primary indicator of how relevant your ad is. So, let's say you're competing with someone for ad position No. 3 on the search results page for a particular keyword. Your max bid is $0.50 and his is $1. He should be way above you, right? Not necessarily. Suppose you have a CTR of 5%, and his is only 1%. Google factors in CTR when calculating ad positions, so you end up with this: max CPC × CTR = (what we'll call) ranking factor. In this case, your ranking factor is 0.025, while your competitor's is only 0.01. Which means your ad shows above his for $0.50, even though he's willing to pay up to $1!

Okay, so now you know the basics of how keywords work in AdWords and how Google charges you for clicks. What's next? Keyword research. The best way to go about this is to use WordTracker. I won't get really specific about how WordTracker works, because they've got a ton of information right there on the site - just go do some reading there when you finish this article. Basically, though, WordTracker will help you find the best keywords to use in your AdWords campaign. You type in any word, and you'll get up to 300 related terms, which you can then click on to find a few hundred variations of that term. The terms you'll get are all terms from WordTracker's search query database, which uses metacrawlers to compile information (again, they explain it on their site if you're really interested). So you know that all the words you find there are real terms that people are actually searching for. Even better, you get a prediction of how many searches to expect per day for any keyword, how many times it shows up in their database, and a KEI value to determine your best words (KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, which you can also read about on the site). You can get a free trial, or you can sign up for a single day to test it out with all the features included (a day's membership is just a few bucks).

There are some free keyword research tools you can use, but I recommend these only for absolute newcomers who have no budget to start out with. Overture's Keyword Inventory is a good, free resource, but there's a catch: it shows results only for searches done through www.yahoo.com. If you're marketing with Google AdWords, you should know that Google accounts for at least twice as many searches as Yahoo!, in some cases three or four times as many. (Though reports vary, Google usually receives credit for about 50-60% of all searches, while Yahoo! gets about 20-30% - but this is based on all searches, and results for individual searches may vary widely.) You may find other "free" tools or downloadable programs that claim to help you with keyword research, but I say don't bother with them. You get what you pay for. Most of them just pull their results directly from other free online tools, and they don't offer anything in the way of features unless you buy the "full version." If you're out to get one for free, just use Overture. (Google's own traffic estimator is decent, but it doesn't give you an exact count for searches within a given period; you just get status bars, which are hard to interpret. Google's bid and position estimates are also usually way off.)

But third-party tools, even if they're very good, won't do your keyword research for you. You'll have to pick through your web site (or your affiliate's sales letter) for words and phrases that you can use. Then, using those words, see if you can think of similar words or concepts that people might be searching for. There's no real trick to this; you've just got to do a lot of brainstorming. Once you've got a good core list, take that over to WordTracker to beef it up. (Hint: If you see any words that don't directly relate to your product, service, or niche, add them as negative matches.)

Now you should have a lean but healthy keyword list. This is your first step to beating out your competition on Google AdWords.

Best SEO Firm: Your Guide To Online Success

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion or the other in the SEO field. Well, it will not serve any of your purpose if you keep on listening to everybody and implementing everything that you come across. If you are very serious about your online business venture, your best bet would be to hire the services of the best SEO firm in your city to do the work for you. No one needs to be told that SEO means search engine optimization, but what they need to be told is what are the proper methods of doing SEO.

Basically, SEO is nothing but publicity methods of a site on the web. Publicity rules and you must make sure that you have the best advertising methods in place for announcing your presence on the web. Competition is immense and you have to risen yourself in this competition to be successful in online business. Search engine marketing is one of the fastest growing industries. To be successful on the web, it is important to do search engine optimization.

For doing successful online business, it is important that your site must be available and accessible to all online visitors at all times of the day. If visitors come to visit your site and sees that your site is not functioning properly, then he will not come back again to the site. The net is a very good source for you to learn about the basics of SEO. However if you want to make use of SEO methods for popularizing your site, hiring SEO services from the best SEO firm is the perfect as well as the safest bet for you.

Sure you will let the best SEO firm handle the job for you, but it pays in the long run if you have a proper knowledge about this. The first and foremost thing that you should do is find out and determine who the target audience of your product is. It would be rather stupid on your part if you are targeting the wrong audience for advertising your product. All your money, time and other resources will simply go waste without yielding any visible results. Your business will just go to a downwards spiral. So take a hold of your online business before it is too late to amend the damage.

Work towards getting targeted traffic to your site. On any given day, your site can have thousands of visitors, but what purpose will this serve if their visit is not monitorized. Making commanding landing pages on your site is a great way of going about attracting the right kind of visitors to your site. Visitors on clicking the link of your site must be immediately transferred to the page that they want to see. This will ensure that visitors do not face any difficulty in finding out what they are looking for.

Hiring the services of the best SEO firm in your city is an excellent source for you to do successful online business. SEO firms are experienced and know what they need to do to make your site successful on the web. There are many aspects that need to be dealt with and taken care of popularizing for your site on the web. Just make sure that you find out the best SEO firm to do the work for your site.

Link building for effective search engine optimization

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.

Robocops

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the "robots exclusion standard" is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a "Keep Out" sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn't be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it's difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won't be read.

In effect, robot.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren't locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is-if it's that sensitive, it shouldn't be on your website to begin with.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn't block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the crawlers rely on the robots to count the keywords, review metatags, titles and crossheads, and even register the hyperlinks.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider submitting your site to a search engine spider simulator, also called search engine robot simulator. These simulators-which can be bought or downloaded from the internet- use the same processes and strategies of different search engines and give you a "dry run" of how they will read your site. They will tell you which pages are skipped, which links are ignored, and which errors are encountered. Since the simulators will also reenact how the bots will follow your hyperlinks, you'll see if your robot.txt protocol is interfering with the search engine's ability to read through all the necessary pages.

It's also important to review your robot.txt files, which will enable you to spot any problems and correct them before you submit them to real search engines.

A Guide to successful pay per click marketing

Pay per click, as the term itself suggests, is a form of advertising that makes use of keywords for popularizing your business on the web. To make a success of your pay per click marketing you need to find the keywords that will best describe about your business. Pay per click marketing is used these days on a large scale, as this is the best way to reach out to online visitors. A study found out that more than seventy five percent of online visitors could be reached through pay per click marketing.

Yes, pay per click marketing is the best source to attract the attention of online visitors, but you must also realize that you need to know all you can before you actually start the process for your business. Nothing can be more frustrating then being caught in a situation where you are not aware of what you are doing and what is happening to your business. So make sure that you know in detail all the nitty gritty about pay per click marketing before using pay per click marketing for your business.

Finding out and identifying the proper keywords is the first task for undertaking pay per click marketing. What you need to do is find out what words will be used by online visitors for searching information or the products that are being sold through your business. There are various tools that can be used for finding out the correct and appropriate keywords for any particular business. Overture, word tracker and digital point are some of the tools that are capable of finding out appropriate keyword for any site in the web.

Sit and plan out carefully what amount of money you are willing to spend on your pay per click marketing campaign. For pay per click marketing, you will have to bid a certain sum of money on keywords that describe your business. Those particular keywords will be used for advertising your goods in major search engines. Whenever a visitor clicks on your site a pre determined amount will be reduced from your bid amount. It is inevitable that you will get many visitors who will click on your site just because your site happens to be listed at the top of sponsored finds in search engines. This cannot be avoided.

There is very little time to grab the attention of visitors. What you can do to grab visitor attention is to making very compelling landing pages. It is very possible that people will not buy goods from you for the first time they visit, but design the page in such a way that at least the visitor leaves behind his email address so that you can contact them in future and tell them about your products. Your landing page must appeal emotionally to the visitor. If you manage to gather the email address you can create a strong database and send out emails through auto responder.

Competition is something that is inevitable and you cannot avoid this in any field. So any marketing strategy including your pay per click marketing strategy must be made and implemented in such a way that you always stay miles ahead of them. Being successful in business is all about beating the competition and no matter how tough the competition, you will have to beat this at all cost.

The World of Duplicate Content - Use of a Filter

The World Wide Web is like a running race or marathon where websites compete to reach the finish line first. In this case the finish line is higher ranking. And in this race for supremacy it is important to avoid duplicate content and its penalties.

To facilitate the efficient functioning of directories search engines have been armed with content filters. This removes or filters duplicate content from pages it's indexing. And the most hurtful penalty is lower rankings.

Unfortunately, these filters not only catch rogues but web pages that are genuine too. What webmasters need to do is understand how filters function and know what action is to be taken to avoid being filtered out.

When a search engine sends out spiders the filters leave out or sieve:

• Websites that feature identical content. And when within a site the webmaster includes many copies or versions of pages to cheat the search engines. Filters are also extremely sensitive to "doorway" pages.

• Content masked by different packaging. Known as "scraped content" this duplication of pages with little or no relevant changes falls prey to filters.

• Product descriptions featured by e-commerce sites. Most e-commerce sites publish alongside a product the manufacturer's description of the product and this content then appears on zillions of e-commerce sites falling victim to filters.

• Articles distributed widely over the net. While some engines are programmed to find the origin of the article there are others who may not be able to source the origins.

• Pages that are not duplicates but contain the same core material written by different people.

To get the better of filters you need to:

• Use a tool like the Similar Page Checker http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php to ensure that the pages in your site are not mirroring content from elsewhere. In case there are other URLS with similar or identical content the tool will reveal them to you and you will be able to make changes in your pages.

• Be vigilant and know who has "helped" themselves to your content. By using www.copyscape.com you can determine which websites have stolen or copied your work.

• Even if you do use distributed content you can add a commentary or make changes to the page focusing on its relevance to your site. By making any content your own you are making it unique and different and this will ensure that the pages are not filtered by search engines.

• Even if you are running an e-commerce site you must include product descriptions that are distinctively yours and not run of the mill.

Lean as much as you can about duplicate content and its dangers. Read the issues that were discussed at the SES 2006 New York Session and other forums. Remember most search engines, Google, Yahoo, or Open Directory Project do not want to be flooded by duplicate content and web pages.

Jake Baillie, President of TrueLocal listed the duplicate content mistakes to be: circular navigation; printer friendly pages; inconsistent linking; product only pages; transparent serving domains; and bad cloaking.

It is important for sites to get high ranking through fair and not foul means.

A guide to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tips

Getting your website listed in Search Engines (SE) can sometime be a monumental task in itself, here are my top ten tips to get you started.

1. Page Title
Forget using 'Welcome to my website' as your page title, if you really want to attract target media specify your keywords and list your product keywords separated by an | (hold Shift + backslash key) symbol (eg: Digital Cameras | Video Cameras) will boost the strength of your chosen keywords, in this case Digital and Video Cameras.

2. Page Filenames
Still naming your page filenames as products.htm or aboutus.php, why not add some weight to your website and help the SE distinguish from the multitude of pages with generic names and again utilise your keywords into your filenames (eg: paper_back_novels.htm) for a Book selling site with this link to the list of Paper Back Novels.

3. ALT Tags
Again keywords play a huge part in the design of your site and another area to include these words is in your image 'ALT" tags.

4. Header Tags
Getting back to your Page Title, there is no point in making the heading text "Welcome to my Website" especially if you are selling Garden Tools. Using , and tags to emphasize your Products and Services in order of importance, lets the SE's.

5. Bold Text
Got something to say?, say it in Bold Text, this tells the SE that this text is important and relates strongly to your content and keywords and should be taken notice of.

6. Keywords
Some say they aren't that important anymore to getting results in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) but using them correctly can add to your sites overall effectiveness. Concentrate on 3 - 4 keyword phrases (eg: "custom website design" or "web site design" for web site designers) and make sure they are used in the first and last paragraphs of your home page content.

7. Google Toolbar
Not only a search tool the Google Toolbar displays each sites Page Rank according to Google on it popularity and web presence.

8. Alexa Toolbar
Download the Alexa Toolbar from Amazon and sign up to their affiliate program, the toolbar is an essential tool in gauging the popularity and hit results of how your website ranks in the www..

9. RSS Feeds
Want to increase traffic? well consider starting a RSS Feed on your website with important news items relating to your business and your chosen profession then link these to your articles.

10. Article Writing
Article writing is another way to cross promote your site with helpful information for others and with links back to your site.

In conclusion
There are many facets to Search Engine Optimisation of websites and these 10 tips are merely just a few and a good starting point to get your website promoted in the www.