Surf’s up
Pay per click search engines have and are still making waves in the search engine and web site promotion industries. They now allow advertisers to get rapid quantifiable results to quickly start reaping the fruits of their toil.
Haste makes waste?
Not in the case of pay per click search engines. PPC search engines provide advertisers with targeted traffic for as low as $0.01 per visitor. Advertisers are only charged for actual visits they receive to their site, not for the number of times their link is viewed (impressions). Editorial reviews of listings prior to approval ensure all search results meet the pay per click search engine’s listing standards.
If the cap fits should you wear it?
With the pay per click model you will be paying for traffic to your website aka paid advertising. Answer yes to any of the following questions and there’s an excellent chance that you could benefit significantly from pay per click ads:
How much toll to pay?
So you’ve decided that pay per click advertising could be for you but you are new to this strategy and aren’t sure how much to pay per visit to your site. Not to worry we have a quick and simple way to decide how much your visitors are worth.
*Note* – this is simply a guideline to approximating the value of each visitor to your site.
1. Check your web site statistics for the last 3 months and get the total # of visits, not hits, you received. (If your site is new then you may want to approximate these based on your business plan figures.)
2. Divide this figure by 3 to get the average # of visitors you receive per month.
3. Calculate the total profit received from web site sales in the last 3 months.
4. Divide this figure by 3 to get the average revenue your site makes per month.
5. Divide your avg. profit per month by your average # of visitors per month.
This will be the approximate profit you receive from each visitor to your site. You can base your bid amount on this value decreasing it to the point where you’re making a satisfactory amount of profit per visitor.
Results
In the end pay per click search engines will bring you traffic. You will be able to choose the cost of this traffic, you will receive targeted traffic, you will only be charged for actual visits to your site. For all websites small, medium, “extra medium” and large this is a viable advertising methods that many companies are already taking advantage of and benefiting from.
If you have a website that needs traffic or needs additional traffic then pay per click advertising should be high on your list of marketing tools.
If you’re new to Internet marketing, the many acronyms and abbreviations often used in discussions on the subject can be confusing. To help you get up to speed quickly, here are the meanings of the most important:
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange – A universally recognized set of digital codes that represent each of the letters, punctuation marks, and other symbols you can type on your computer. What people usually mean by “plain text.”
ASP
Application Service Provider – Company that offers access to software applications and related services over a network or the Internet.
B2B
Business to Business – Refers to trade between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers.
B2C
Business to Consumer – Refers to businesses selling products or services to end-user consumers.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface – A way web servers pass information to and from application programs (to process forms for example). CGI programs or “scripts” can be written in several programming languages, including C, C++, Java and Perl.
CPA
Cost Per Action – Cost to an advertiser for each visitor that takes a specific action in response to an ad, such as subscribing to an ezine, requesting a free trial, or making a purchase. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPC
Cost Per Click – Cost to an advertiser for each click on a promotional link by a site visitor or newsletter reader. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPL
Cost Per Lead – Advertising expenditure required to obtain each new sales lead.
CPM
Cost Per Thousand – The amount charged per thousand impressions (showings) of an ad (“M” is the Roman numeral for 1000). Whilst websites sell ad impressions in blocks of 1000, with newsletters the number of subscribers determines the final price. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPS
Cost Per Sale – Advertising expenditure divided by sales generated to determine the cost to make each sale; or the commission payable for each sale generated by an affiliate.
CR
Conversion Rate/ Ratio – The percentage of respondents to an ad, or readers of a sales message that complete the action desired (usually making a purchase, but can also be subscribing to a newsletter, for example).
CRM
Customer Relationship Management – Improving interaction with customers through better understanding, with the aim of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty (thus increasing profits).
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets – Used to globally define how elements in a Web page are displayed instead of relying on HTML code in the page. Makes designs more flexible and reduces HTML file sizes.
CTR
Click-Through Rate/ Ratio – The percentage of website visitors or newsletter readers who click on a particular link. Used to measure response to ads or sales messages.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions – Often used as the title of a page on websites that answers commonly asked questions about a product or service.
FFA
Free-For-All Links – Web pages that allow anyone to add a link back to their own website, usually in exchange for accepting promotional messages from the FFA page owner.
PFI
Pay For Inclusion – Paying to have web pages included in a search engine’s database and regularly updated.
PPA
Pay-Per-Action – Affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for generating a specific action, such as taking a free trial or subscribing to an ezine. PPL, PPC and PPS are usually considered as PPA.
PPI
Pay Per Impression – Where an advertiser pays for each display (impression) of their advertisement (usually a banner).
PPL
Pay-Per-Lead – Where a commission is paid for each sales lead generated by an affiliate. A “lead” is usually defined as somebody who signs up for a free trial, or requests further information, etc.
PPC
Pay Per Click – Ad sales or affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for each click on a promotional link by a consumer.
PPCSE
Pay Per Click Search Engine – A search engine where the results are composed of advertisers who pay a fee for each click on their listing. Using a bidding system, the advertiser willing to pay the most is ranked highest.
PPS
Pay-Per-Sale – Where a commission is paid for each sale generated by an affiliate. The commission is usually a percentage of the sale, although sometimes it’s a fixed amount.
ROI
Return on investment – How much profit is made after advertising and other costs have been subtracted. A measure of how successful a marketing campaign is in terms of the returns on money spent.
RON
Run Of Network – Where ads (usually CPM banners) are shown (rotated) across the pages of the entire network of sites owned by a company, or controlled by a particular advertising network. Cheaper than only having the ad appear on selected sites.
ROS
Run Of Site – Where ads are rotated across the pages of a single site. Cheaper than only having the ad appear on selected pages.
SE
Search Engine – A searchable database of pages on the Web. Different from an Index (like Yahoo) in that pages are not reviewed by a human editor before inclusion.
SEM
Search Engine Marketing – Similar to SEO (below), and sometimes used to emphasize that generating quality targeted traffic is of greater importance than simply obtaining high rankings. Can also include PPCSEs and other search engine advertising.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization – The process of optimizing web pages to achieve high rankings in the search results of a search engine, in order to attract more visitors.
SEP
Search Engine Positioning – Getting your page listed on the search engine results page. Similar to SEO.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page – The page of listings displayed upon completion of a search at a search engine.
SSI
Server Side Include – A way for a web server to include variable values and information from an external source into a web page as it is requested by the browser. Uses include automatic display of data like the Last Modified date of the page, or storing common page elements in their own files, enabling site-wide updates by modifying a single file.
USP
Unique Selling Proposition – The reason why somebody should buy from you and not your competition. The unique benefits that your products or services offer consumers. What it is that makes you special, different.
I suggest you print this article out and keep it somewhere handy. Refer to it whenever you’re not quite sure what something stands for, and before you know it you’ll be an old hand!
Author Bio:
Online since 1998, Azam Corry helps marketers succeed. Get Free Guides, Tools & Web Marketing Resources at: http://NowSell.com/ Speed profits with resale rights ebooks & packages: http://eBookSaver.com/?a => SPECIAL FROM AZAM: Subscribe Now to Biz Bits eZine & get my Big info-packed eCourse PLUS real-value ebooks 100% FREE! Just BizBits@NowSell.com
What is click through?
Click through or click popularity is the number of times your web site gets a click when it is displayed in the results of the search engines. It also depends on how much time the visitors, coming to your site from the search results, spend on your web site.
Now a days, many crawler based search engines as well as human edited directories seem to use the concept of click popularity within their ranking algorithm.
Direct Hit considers click popularity to be the dominating factor while determining the ranking of a web site. In Direct Hit, the success of your site depends, on how many clicks your web site attracts and how long they spend on your web site. Apart from DirectHit, Excite, Hotbot and Yahoo! also use click popularity as an important factor in their ranking algorithm. This makes improving your click through an important step of your search engine optimization plan. (more…)
What are log files?
Log files are text files that are automatically created when someone accesses your web site. They record the requests made to your web server. These files are opened when the web services of your server starts and remain open as your server responds to requests. The request information is added to the log files in “real time”.
Logs tell you if search engine optimization and other marketing operations are successful. These logs will also show you exactly in which zones you have success and where you need to put in more work. A wealth of information about the activities of your visitors is available from your web server log files. These can be used for various marketing plans and troubleshooting. (more…)
I tend to spend a lot of time in various search engine forums and newsgroups answering questions related to search engines. One of the most common questions that seems to come up is along the lines of: “My site was in Google yesterday and ranking well and today it’s gone! What happened?”
or
“I made some changes to my site and Google picked them up, but now, it shows the old page again. Why would Google do this?” and a number of other variations on the above two questions.
With the importance of Google these days, it’s no wonder that situations like the above would have webmasters quite worried. After all, with all the reports of sites being penalized or banned, having your site completely disappear could be a bit troublesome.
Luckily, there is a very easy explanation for the above phenomena and it’s been lovingly referred to as “Everflux”. What exactly is Everflux? (more…)
“Which search engines use link popularity as a factor in ranking pages?” Well, that question has become pretty moot these days. Just about every spider based search engine uses link popularity as a factor. So, how do you find out how much link popularity your site has? And how do you know which sites are actually linking to you? In this article, I’ll tell you how you can find out the link popularity of your site in some of the major search engines. (more…)
Intro
Getting your site registered by the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) is vitally important as far as search engine positioning is concerned. In order to see how you can do that, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&open-directory.htm However, sometimes, it may so happen that try as you might, you just do not manage to get your site listed in the Open Directory. Or, it may also happen that the description under which your site is listed is not optimum.
In this case, the only solution is to become the editor of the category to which you want to submit your site. Here’s how you should go about doing it. (more…)
Search Engine Marketing?
What it Means To Be a Search Engine Marketing Professional
There’s a lot of stuff posted on search engine forums and newsletters around the world about how companies who spam the search engines are unethical, and that it’s important to hire only “ethical SEO consultants” or “ethical search engine marketers.”
But, if you think about it, ethics is not something that’s quantifiable. What makes any given SEO technique ethical or unethical? Isn’t ethics more of a way of life than a method for doing something? Is trying to trick the search engines really unethical? Sure, it’s stupid, in my opinion, but is it really unethical? I don’t believe that those who practice what I sometimes refer to as “shady SEO techniques” can necessarily be classified as unethical. Just as everyone who follows every search engine rule can’t automatically be assumed to be ethical. (more…)
Intro
In case you are not aware, there is a revolution happening in Internet search engines. There are search engines out there that allow you to bid on your placement under the search terms of your choice!
Pay for placement search engines are quickly taking over as the search engine of choice for both web business people and for the web consumer. This type of search engines eliminates the ambiguity of placement algorithms, allowing advertisers to directly control their placement. The consumer benefits because pay for placement eliminates the motivation of less scrupulous businesses to spam the search engine with bogus terms. Therefore, the results tend to be more targeted and productive.
It has been my experience that Pay For Placement search engine have one of the highest return on investment ratios of any means of advertising I use. So how can the Internet business person use the pay for placement search engines to their advantage?
The Key Words
First of all, I recommend bidding on as many keywords and search terms as possible. You may well ask, “Why not focus on a few highly requested terms?” The reason is simple; the high frequency terms are usually the most expensive, and sometimes several dollars per click. Unless your product has extremely large profit margins or your purchase per click ratio is very high, the high frequency terms are cost prohibitive. Instead of bidding on these few terms, focus on many related terms, some of which will get you a number one listing for pennies per click.
You may be asking yourself, “So how do I go about choosing the right keywords?” The answer to that is simple and one I advocate frequently, Do Your Homework. Get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, making two columns. Think about the web site that you wish to list in the search engines. If you were a potential customer, trying to find your product, what term or terms would you search for? Write these terms down in the left column on your piece of paper. Next, get out a thesaurus and look up synonyms to your terms and write them down in the same column. Third, go to the search engines and perform searches on your list of terms. Visit the sites that currently enjoy top listings. View their source and make note of terms in their keywords in the right column of your list. Compare the two columns highlighting the terms in the right column that do not already appear in the left column. When finished, move the highlighted terms to the left column. In the left column you now have a list of candidate terms for your keywords.
Other Matters
Next, you must develop an attention catching title and description. Avoid clich� filler words and phrases. Be as descriptive as possible within the constraints imposed by the search engine. Including the search term in the title and description will increase click through rates. Test different titles and descriptions for effectiveness.
Start out bidding one cent per keyword and see where you fall in the listings. Most of the pay for placement search engines will allow you to adjust the amount of your bid, so now spend some time adjusting your bid to get the placement you want. Remember you don’t have to be number one to get traffic. Usually, somewhere in the top in the top ten will do nicely. Keep track of your terms and bids in a spreadsheet. This will make it faster and easier to track your results.
Remember to monitor your keywords for positioning. Adjust your bids if necessary to maintain your position. Change the title or the description to stimulate a stale keyword.
Final Words
Pay for position search engines are not a substitute for maintaining your web page. The Keywords, Description and Title Meta tags, as well as keyword density, are still critical to your positioning in the regular search engines. Utilizing these tips simply gives you another trick to add to your arsenal in the search engine wars.
Author Bio:
Tony L. Callahan, is a successful Internet Promotions Consultant with more than twenty years of industry experience and is president of his own Internet marketing company, Link-Promote. He also publishes Web-Links Monthly, a newsletter full of tips, tricks, tools and techniques for successful web site promotions. To subscribe, send e-mail to: Web-Links-subscribe@topica.com. For an online archive of Tony’s articles available for reprint, visit: http://www.link-promote.com/articles
Briefing
A #1 search results position for your site, it almost seems like a fairy tale. Like the abominable snowman, many question the validity and effectiveness of the tips, tricks and techniques that are commonly found on the web or elsewhere. I have read many books, articles, newsletters, gotten sound advice from experts, and gone through the time baring process of plan do review many times. Through my experiences I have learned the strategies revealed in this article and have decided to share my knowledge on the matter with you.
Before I begin, I would like to tell you what this article is not going be about. It is not a thrown together set of tips that you normally find. It will, obviously, include some strategies you are familiar with or may have heard of before but will also describe techniques that I have proven to be successful and that hopefully you will use to do the same.
Firstly, No One Technique will get you the results you desire. That would be too easy and in the fight for a good search engine position the old adage, ‘No Pain No Gain’, is deemed appropriate.
Ok enough of the intro let’s get down to business.
Domain Names
Contrary to popular belief your choice in domain name can play a significant role in your search engine position. E.g. you have a website that is about web hosting and you would like to target the search term ‘web hosting’ one of the best domain names you could choose is webhosting.com.
Why?
1. The search engines see this domain name as being highly relevant to the search term as it is composed of the search term.
2. Other people having an interest in ‘web hosting’ also see this name as being highly relevant and will feel that this is one of THE websites for web hosting and will be more willing to link to this URL. With link popularity very important, for the #1 search engine Google and others, this will definitely aid in your chances for a high position.
Does this mean that I am at a disadvantage because my domain name doesn’t contain the search term mainly used by my target market?
Not necessarily. You see you could have a much more popular site with more valuable content than say your competitor that managed to grab this domain name before you could. This is also very important. Remember, No One Technique will get you the results you desire.
However, if there were two identical sites in every aspect except for the domain name then in a search for ‘Web Hosting’ webhosting.com would prevail. You also have the option of using web-hosting.com however the use of hyphens is less popular end users as it is more of a hassle.
Links & Link Text
Hyperlinks and Hyperlink Text are also key ingredients in the recipe for great search engine placement. If you are targeting the search term ‘web hosting’, having links on your site with names like webhosting.html or web-hosting.html or web-hosting-faqs.html as well as text with a similar naming convention also add a great flavor to your site’s success. You, more than likely, won’t find it appropriate to use this naming strategy for all your links but keep in mind it takes 25 pennies to make a quarter and falling short of this is just that. Using these names show the search engines that it isn’t only your homepage that has information about ‘web hosting’ but also other areas of your site.
Tag You’re It
Meta Tags
To Meta or Not To Meta? If that’s the question then here’s the answer.
Definitely use Meta Tags in your web pages. Search engines do still use these as a factor in their algorithms and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to add them to the html. Some say “But what if Meta Tags don’t work?” and in return I say “What if they do”.
Your Meta Tags should be relevant to your web page’s content. Don’t stuff in keywords to try and increase your chances in the search engines. That makes no sense. Search engine optimization is a science and should be treated as such. Choose your Meta keywords wisely ensure that any keyword used is either on your page or directly related to the content on your page. Your Meta description should be enough to give a blind man insight on your site. Customize the Meta tags for each of your pages. Once again Your Meta Tags should be relevant to your web page’s content. There are some very helpful programs that will aid you in your Meta Tag creation such as Web Position Gold2.
Alt Tags
Name your Alt tags to reflect the search term you are targeting. If your site is www.NetVisits.com and you’re adding alt tags to your logo, don’t simply put NetVisits, www.NetVisits.com or NetVisits.com add a few words to give your users as well as the search engines a bit more information. E.g. NetVisits.com – Pay Per Click Search Engine.
Other Tags
Though I will only briefly mention the following tag they all pay a role in boosting your movement to the top. The Comment Tag, Headline Tag, Table Summary Tag and the Noframes Tag should not be neglected. Many website creators neglect to utilize these tools to aid in their search engine optimization. Don’t be one of them. Add them to your arsenal.
Potent Content
There is no point to targeting a search term if there is no content about it on your site. Your homepage doesn’t have to be densely populated with content for a good placement but it should have some form of relevant content even if it is just a brief description of the benefits gained by using it. The search term MUST be present a few times on your homepage. This is not critical but more along the lines of essential.
Content is a MAJOR factor but not just anything thrown together on the topic. Lets say you’re eating your favorite meal (yes I use the food analogy a lot, what can I say, I love food). Any restaurant or person can slap together the ingredients to make it that meal but if they use the best quality ingredients and take the time and make the effort to do it right, then they become the one that you remember, the one you want to go back to. Get it?
Try and include a paragraph or two about or relevant to your site near the top of your page that include the search term you are targeting so the search engine robot is quickly faced with content.
The search engines crave good content, make them crave yours. Use articles, newsletters, general information, tips, FAQs, whatever is appropriate. But use something, and don’t stop even if you’re content with your content, always strive to improve on the old and introduce the new. If you don’t have time to write articles etc, there are many resources on the web that provide these free of charge. They normally include a link back to the author’s site but it’s worth it, nothing in life is free.
What’s Your Title
To show you the power of a good title here is a brief story. TRUE STORY I once had a site that was #2 in Google for the search term I was targeting. I created some additional pages but neglected to fill these pages with content, due to an unexpected lack of time, for a few weeks. These were new pages, with no content at all, just titles and Meta Tags. The next time I checked my statistics I noticed an amazing increase of over 30,000 unique visitors. I had no idea how this happened until I notice that these pages had all been spidered and were now in the search engines results. Needless to say the titles and Meta Tags were the key to this increase. When they were populated with content the results were even more amazing. Need I say more?
Use Maps
Structure
Graphics, animation and the like will make your site attractive but use them sparingly as search engines prefer simplicity. Don’t present the search engine robot with a clutter of things to search through, keep it simple. Try and place the most important links near to the top of your pages and once again at the bottom and keep those page sizes below 50k (a more than generous size).
Sitemaps
Further feed the search engine robots by creating a sitemap. This is a page which contains links to the major areas of your site. Include as many of your site links as possible and with a small site include all links. Add a short description to each link to guide users as to the purpose of the link destination. This also gives you the opportunity to add more of your keywords to this page.
Link & Close
Link popularity is when other websites contain links to your site. The more links to your site, the higher your link popularity. With link popularity, quality is just as important as quantity. Having sites with similar content to yours link to your site is worth more than unrelated sites linking to your site. Many search engines, including the #1 search engine Google, put a high importance on link popularity.
When optimizing for search engines there’s one thing that must never be left out EVERYTHING. Do it all, use all methods and use them well and you’re sure to see the results you want. Remember, No One Technique will get you the results you desire.
