Is Your PPC Paying Off?

By Domain Expert

Dec

17

When pay-per-click search engines were relatively new, I went to work for one in all them. I had just come off operating for eBay, and operating for another “dot com” during a comparatively new industry intrigued me.

I had a plus over others vying for the task, as I was a home business owner and actually used the services of the company I used to be applying to work at.

However I also had another agenda. As a home business owner, I desired to find out more concerning the PPC market, and after I got the task I learned a lot of than I spotted there was to be told!

For those of you unfamiliar with pay-per-click search engines, here is a basic run down of how they work: Advertisers bid on keywords in an auction-vogue format. The best bidders get their listings placed in the foremost optimal positions within the search engine results. Advertisers pay the number of their bid whenever their ad is clicked on by a searcher.

The speculation is that advertisers can only get hold of the foremost highly qualified traffic: searchers that are trying specifically for what the advertiser is selling. However as you’ll have already worked out, there is a ton of potential for fraud.

Alot of the ads you pay money for show up on third-party sites, where the house owners of those sites get paid when their guests click on the ads. Fraud occurs when website owners click on the ads with no intention of creating a procurement, or convince others to click those ads when they normally wouldn’t. These sorts of visits to your website are known as fraudulent clicks.

It’s impossible to stop all fraudulent clicks, but there are ways to considerably reduce them. Reducing fraudulent clicks is the responsibility of the PPC provider. But it’s been revealed that some PPC providers ignore the matter, citing that they’d lose business if they were to scale back fraudulent clicks.

This is often backwards thinking obviously. Corporations that pay scores of greenbacks (literally) each year on PPC promoting do not spend a single penny with firms with an excess of fraudulent clicks. Loss of the large spenders has place some PPC suppliers out of business.

However how can you recognize if the clicks you are getting are fraudulent or not? There is no method to tell for certain; however, performance comparisons between PPC suppliers are a smart indicator (ie: if one keyword with one supplier is garnering you a high conversion rate, whereas the identical keyword with another supplier includes a nearly zero% conversion, it is a pretty smart clue that the latter is sending you a lot of fraudulent clicks).

However receiving legitimate clicks is no guarantee of conversions. This can be why it’s important to trace the guests you receive to find out what your conversion level is. Bear in mind that a conversion is a visitor to your site that takes a desired action. For on-line retailers, that action is most typically a purchase.

It may sound like you wish a ton of pricey software to trace this kind of knowledge for you. But the reality is, most PPC providers offer conversion tracking as a free service!

The concept is terribly simple. Your PPC supplier provides you with a snippet of code that you place on a page on your website. The page you place this code on ought to be a page that a visitor to your website is shipped to when taking the required action (ie: if the specified action may be a purchase, then place the code on the acquisition-confirmation page).

When a surfer clicks on your ad, the PPC supplier places a cookie on the surfer’s machine. The snippet of code is designed to read this cookie where it finds out that ad was clicked on and that keyword the visitor sought for to supply your ad. It then reports back to your PPC provider this data, where you’ll easily view it.

Viewing this information can tell you which of them keywords are performing the most effective, and that keywords are not working at all. Use this data to maximize your selling dollars by moving more money into advertising the ads and keywords that offer you with the very best conversion rates, and stop spending cash on ads and keywords that are not providing you with any come back on your investment.

Have you ever wished that there was a speed ppc for cell phone numbers? Get the truth behind those unknown cell phone numbers by using the speed ppc. Go to speed ppc now and you will get the truth in a few minutes!

Seo Search Engine Optimaization Tips

By Domain Expert

Oct

28

Search Engine Optimization uses a combination of techniques, tools, and technical know-how to get results .Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the careful optimization of corporate web sites to effectively increase their visibility in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista,and many others. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.
• Meta Tags
• Navigational links
• Rich Content

Meta Tags:
Meta Tags are very important for your website’s visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them .Major meta tags that you can use:

Meta Title
The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes.

Meta Description
Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. “content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point.

Meta Keyword
Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas.

Navigational links:
at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines “read” your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what’s important on your page.

Rich Content:
The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they’re looking for when they get there. Keep your site very content rich. Have a lot of pages.Update the site even twice a day if you have the time. Updating your site does not mean that you copy paste content from other sites.That will only push your rankings further down. Don’t have any duplicate content. At the same time ,dont spam multiple content across the same website. When a search engine views or reviews a website, which they do at least every few months, it looks for specific characteristics found in the content of website landing pages.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing review. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing. Visit his website, one week marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

SEO And Links Explained

By Domain Expert

Sep

19

Links – the official currency of SEO-land In this article I often use the words credibility, authority, confidence, reputation, etc. I may be inconsistent with my use of words, but they all refer to the same thing – this abstract currency that flows among sites that link to each other. When page A links to page B, page A gives page B a fraction of its authority. If page A has too many outgoing links, it will end up with little authority. Similarly, if page B has few links but receives many links, it will end up with a great deal of authority. Keep this concept in mind when you read the new few sections of this article.Incoming Links The value of an incoming link depends on: The content of the linking page The link text The content immediately around the link The number of links on the page The position of the link within the content (header, footer, main body?) How well the content of the linking page compares to that of the target website If you’re considering purchasing incoming links, I strongly recommend you consider all the points above before reaching for your wallet. Incoming links cannot damage your rankings. SEs understand you can’t control who links to your website so you will not be penalized if you receive links from bad neighbourhoods. They will simply be of no benefit to you. The only problem is when you link to a bad neighbourhood (see external links below). External Links External links are an important aspect of quality content. It’s always good to offer a few links to related quality content. But beware of whom you link to. Incoming links cannot damage your reputation, but an outgoing link to a bad neighbourhood can very much do so. A link is a ‘vote of confidence’ to the page you’re linking to and you definitely do not want to give your precious votes to poor quality websites – quite simply – it makes you look bad. Reciprocal Links I’m well known to be sceptical when it comes to reciprocal links (probably because of this article ). One true, sincere incoming link is much more valuable than a thousand reciprocal links. If you read the ‘Incoming Links’ section above you’ll understand, but here’s why: Reciprocal links Link is usually on a page with poor or no content Links are normally considered poor quality because the content surrounding the link is unrelated Content of linking page is almost always unrelated Linking pages normally have dozens if not hundreds of external links Link pages normally have low PR because of the number of outgoing links So basically, reciprocal links give you a tiny share of something that isn’t worth much in the first place.One-Way links on the other hand… Link is on a page of quality content Content is related to the link Content of linking page is related to your website Linking page with have a minimal amount of outgoing links, usually just yours. Article pages can only improve their PRs because they get traffic, they get bookmarked and linked to by people (used as reference). So basically, you get a big share of something that’s very valuable will only get better! I’m no genius but I know what I’d go for… So one-way links are a win-win situation. “Oh yeah? How the hell am I going to get incoming links genius-boy?”, you say. Fear not my friend, read on and you shall find the way…

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing. Visit his website, one week marketing review, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

SEO Best Practice: Befriend The Directories

By Domain Expert

Sep

19

Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

- Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, “blue cats”).

- Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

- Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

- The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

- Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

- Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

- Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

- You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing review. Visit his website, one week marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

SEO: For Search Engines Or Humans

By Domain Expert

Sep

19

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return. If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing review. Visit his website, one week marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

SEO ‘Tools Of The Trade’

By Domain Expert

Sep

19

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when you’re just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, and Agent Web Ranking.

WordTracker’s keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.

Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:

1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.

2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what they’re doing.

3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.

4. Helps to monitor sites you’ve exchanged links with, to ensure that they’re still linking to you.

Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site — by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself you’ll often find it’s not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once you’ve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.

Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings – this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but they’re wrong. You need to continuously check your site’s rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.

The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. It’s not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.

If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can. By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade!

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing. Visit his website, one week marketing review, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

The Seven Secret Skills Of SEO Work

By Domain Expert

Aug

17

There is a lot of talk on the web regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how, if you just do this one thing, you will be at the top of Google. If only it were that easy! In fact, I believe there are seven distinct skills that a search engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all seven. In truth, to get to all seven, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. This takes time and effort and, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this?

The seven skills that I believe are necessary for SEO work are:

Web Design – producing a visually attractive page

HTML coding – developing Search Engine friendly coding that sits behind the web design

Copy writing – producing the actual readable text on the page

Marketing – what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?

An eye for detail – even the smallest errors can stop spiderbots visiting your site.

Patience – there is a time lag on any change you make, waiting is a virtue.

IT skills – an appreciation of how search engine programs and the algorithms they use actually work

Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations and clever features hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big mistake; using designs like these may actually decrease your chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to crawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.

I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem.

So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to find site. The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.

This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in Google. We actually run seven test domains which are testing different theories with different search engines. Remember that different search engines use different criteria and algorithms to rank your site – one size does not fit all.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi, love text – but only when written well in properly constructed English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, they may actively penalise your site – in Google terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but n t until results page 14 – really useful! As well as good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.

The fourth skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing – marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing
skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.

The next skill is an eye for detail. Even a simple change to a web page can create an error that means the spiderbots will not crawl your site. Recently, I put a link to a page that didn’t have www. at the front of the address. The link still worked but the spiders stopped crawling, and it took my partner to find the error. We have recently invested in a very sophisticated html validator that picks up errors that other validators just fail to see. These errors do not stop the pages displaying correctly to the human eye, but cause massive problems with spiderbots. Almost all the code that I look at on the web using this validator flags major errors, even from SEO companies.

The sixth skill is patience, or is it a virtue! Some people seem to want to make daily changes and then think they can track the web page ranking results the next day. Unfortunately, it can take a week for absolutely correct changes to take effect, in which time you have made six other changes. Add to this Google’s
reticence to allow new sites straight on to its listings by adding a waiting factor of, maybe, three months for new sites, and you have a totally uncontrollable situation. We say to all our clients that a piece of SEO work should be looked at like a marketing campaign that runs for six months, since it is only after that time that a true judgement of the effectiveness of the work can be made.

The final and seventh skill is an appreciation of how search engines and algorithms work, for this where both IT and maths experience is useful. People who have programmed at a detailed systems level have a natural feeling for how spiderbots will read a page, what they will search for, what tables they will set up, what weightings they may give to different elements. All of this builds a picture of the database that will be created and how it will be accessed when a search is undertaken. Unfortunately, this skill is the most difficult one to learn as it relies on many years experience of systems programming.

So, in summary, I would say “If it was easy everyone would be doing it!”. I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.

This article is distributed by Hansel Gunners. He owns a site, earth4energy review. Feel free to look at his earth4energy review website. You can also send your feedback at his earth4energy review site. Thank you.