SEO Thai Thai

Social media is the in thing nowadays. There is not a single day that passes without a story on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or the stars of the social media space making it to the airwaves or the ink. The success of Obama and our very own Pink Chaddi campaign is fresh in our memories and already spoken to death in social media conferences and seminars. On the other side, every other day, witness a new venture or foray into the space. If one adds up all the hype, then social media should have already arrived from a brand communication and marketing perspective. Well, not really. Here is my take on what it will take to get social media which I agree is hot and presents profound new ways of touch, communication and engagement, can get there.

Need to go beyond piecemeal and one person service providers

Yes, it is the most democratic medium or platform. Yes, the young are more comfortable with the Orkuts, twitters and facebooks than the old and yes there is no geographical constraint as internet is universal. But let us not forget that brands or the process of branding (except for a few categories) is not something special or separate for social media. Social media needs new ways of adoption and customization to suit its’ unique ecosystem and ways but it is not that the branding process itself, is in for a radical change. This means that successful social media initiatives can be executed consistently over a period of time only with firms or players who have an understanding of how brands and the branding process works and then combine this understanding with social media expertise. While social media is powerful, combined offline and online campaigns will create higher impact.

Need to go beyond tracking or listening

Am not sure how many know this. Software or tools that are meant for listening in social media are growing in abundance and at last count had 18 such URLs or names in my database. Am talking only of players who are visible and this number by itself seems to be growing at a brisk pace. While it is useful, let us understand that it is only the first step in a formal process a brand needs to undergo in social media.

Need to go beyond blogs

There is an urgent need to look beyond blogs, though blogs show a lot of promise, what with mobile blogs, video blogs and more. Am saying this more from the perspective that there are evolved tools like Twitter, Maplib, social bookmarking sites, besides the Facebooks, that truly offer immense potential. For example a friend of mine had done a campaign for a movie using twitter and maplib that was both creative and engaging. I also saw a website which is a wiki with the feeds on YouTube linked. A great idea, simply because these two tools have combined reach which is smartly being utilized. Heard someone recently tell me that Dell extensively uses Twitter for its global customer support.

Need to break the myth of complexity

Social media is not as techie or geekish or complex as many think or make it out to be. There are couple of thumb rules which work fairly well for starters. For example just focus on starting a blog and then use all the social media tools available to promote it. Also social media is not about just getting in but using it smartly to be heard and be visible.

Need to experiment

Let us be clear that all that is happening in social media is experiments and there are bound to be successful and bad experiments. The best is to learn from it and move on, as the space itself is exploding fast and learning is the most precious commodity around in the space. Much like a battle scarred veteran who wears his scars on his sleeve.

Need to be choosy

Not all brands and companies are suited for social media since it is a different world out there. While it is exciting and great for some, it will be out of bounds for many. A company and its entire organization needs to be ready and be prepared for what social media entails and can assure of a surefire disaster if one is not prepared and goes around thinking it is like advertising which one can control. Even firms who play in the space would be well advised to do the diligence as too many failures or bad starts is bound to speed derailing enthusiasm, to adopt the media.

There are many more need to do lists and hope what I have said and listed makes for a good start and gets us cracking into a cracker of a space called social media.

The Internet is such a great medium to make something popular. It is a lucrative way to earn. There are a lot of things to consider before engaging with an online business before starting its operations if one is really aiming for success in it. Just in case a site is already active online and the main problem is just leading people to view it and to have higher ranks on search engine optimizations, here are some tips to generate traffic to a site in a short time.

1. Join a traffic exchange program. There are currently a lot of traffic exchanges online. It is even better to join more than one program at a time to get the most out of the benefits one can get from it. This will easily bring traffic to a site as long as enough time and effort is allotted to it.

As the name itself says, traffic exchange means exchanging traffic by viewing member sites. There are credit ratios given per member site to be viewed. These credits shall be assigned to a site or page that the other members can view to gain credits as well. Considering the traffic exchange method, it implies that the more a member views other member sites, the more credits the member will have, and the more chances his or her site will also be viewed by the other members.

2. Make sure that a certain time is allotted to traffic exchange each day. At least one hour per day could do. Giving time to browse for traffic exchange will help drive traffic to a site in a short period, and continuously doing so will help drive traffic to the site continuously as well. In addition, there are also big chances of making the other members become potential customers upon viewing the site. The next tip discusses this.

3. Create a splash page or a squeeze page. These are web pages that consist of a summary of the business details. They usually have a headline, list of benefits, simple graphics, photo and signature of the owner. A splash page contains a link to the main site that potential customers can click on if in case they get interested with it. A squeeze page has a link where people can leave their contact details.

On the other hand, different traffic exchange programs have different timers. This ranges from 10 to 30 seconds, and is the minimum amount of time to spend before being able to surf for another site.

If the main web site has a lot of stuff to load, it will take time before the viewer sees the whole picture. Once traffic is directed to the site and the timer ends without seeing the complete site, the chance to have a potential customer is lost. It would be best to create another page that would serve as the landing page of the people viewing the site through traffic exchange. In this way, page loading will be faster and people viewing will get the gist of what the business is all about.

These 3 simple tips can be considered as solutions to generating traffic to a site at the soonest time possible. This would be better than leaving the site alone with thousands of sites online, and take very few chances of being viewed by the target traffic.

Whether we like it or not, marketing strategies play a big part in opening a business. Although the World Wide Web has successfully provided us a huge marketplace to display all our products, it’s just not enough to get the much needed number of sales. People go through great lengths to hopefully increase web traffic in their online sites. Unfortunately, not all procedures can bring in your desired results.

In truth, you do not have to go through great lengths to get a good portion of the online market. You simply need to explore the availabilities in the internet so as to generate a good amount of traffic in your website. In order to help you out, here are a few things that you would need to drive the most surmountable web traffic share:

1. Pen and Paper

Write articles and help your own web page generate that traffic for you. You can provide simple guides related to the products that you sell or your own feedbacks and reviews pertaining to your merchandise. This will help people be more interested with the information provided in your website, and eventually try the products themselves. Producing well-written articles can help you increase traffic on your website and also let people know more about the things that you sell.

2. Interaction

What better tool to use in online interaction than your very own forum? Forums have provided an excellent way in making a lot of brands and companies interactive with their possible and previous consumers. Building this rapport with your past and present clients will then help you get your future customers. While you have a forum, you can also use this as a way to promote your products with other site visitors and help them familiarize themselves with your catalogs. With a well established forum, you are sure to get right amount of traffic for your website.

Pay Per Click has relatively emerged as a popular marketing tool over the years in the internet marketing industry. It involves paying each time a user clicks on your link.

It is an internet advertising method where advertisers bid on specific keywords relevant to particular product or service. Subsequently, advertiser has to make payments for visits based on keywords chosen by them. Higher bids usually get the top listing. Let’s say that in a search engine three advertisers bid on that same keyword “website”. Consequently, advertisers submit their bids on the same keyword like $1, $2 and $3 respectively. So, whenever a visitor clicks on advertisers listing, advertisers will be charged as per their bid amount.

Bid price is not only the factor to ensure top rankings of ads. There are several other factors which determine the top rankings in search engines like Click through rate, Competition, Historical data etc. Besides this PPC has certain benefits and downsides which cannot be missed out.

Pros

* PPC campaigns give you an opportunity to widen your online customers’ horizon and effective way to attract potential customers.

* PPC campaigns are considered to be the most cost effective method to increase sales and higher ROI.

* With the help of PPC campaigns, you can easily control per visitors costs since you only pay for the visitors that actually click on your advertisement.

* PPC programs gives you chance to opt for the correct and suitable words to promote your products and services. Although, the more you pay, the higher you will appear on search engines.

* With Pay per click you can easily track response rate of your ads which was almost completely lacking in traditional offline advertising. Moreover, a PPC campaign enables you to get feedback instantly on who is responding to your ads

Cons

Pay per click cannot be completely called as a failsafe method. Hence, it also some disadvantages attached to it.

The following are the cons

* PPC cannot always guarantee high traffic. Although it’s a popular method but still it mostly receives less traffic coupled with low conversion rate.

* PPC campaign involves extensive keyword research. So, a selection of wrong keyword might generate very little or no traffic.

* PPC campaigns can turn into futile campaigns if the caption and content is not effectively.

* Often people are apprehensive and fear of being misled or deceived by PPC ad campaigns. That’s why people believe only organic listings which are regular on search engines instead of sponsored listings.

* PPC campaigns can be very expensive and yet ineffectual if not executed cautiously. It should be carefully done as it involves paying for each and every visitor also including those who don’t buy.

Internet undoubtedly is the greatest source of information we will ever have and there is no stopping to it. It is also a viable source for commerce and is evident from the fact that e-commerce websites are mushrooming all over the World Wide Web. People buy online because it’s simple, fast and easy. Sniffing this tremendous opportunity, many offline businesses have joined the online bandwagon and raked in revenue; something they failed to realize earlier. However, this multi channel presence gave birth to a precarious situation - tracking delayed conversion.

Numerous studies and polls have shown that people extensively use Internet as a research tool because of its ability to provide vast pool of information for every imaginable thing. But when it comes to buying people prefer to visit their nearby brick and motor shop. This is especially true for products and services that are characterized by long sales cycle and therefore lead to delayed conversion. “It’s increasingly clear that consumers who search for products Online will often visit brick-and-mortar locations to complete their purchase”, a statement made by John Miniati, Vice President, comScore. The statement clearly demonstrates that online research fuels offline sales.

The growth and rampant adoption of web analytics to measure online conversion and therefore justify the marketing spend is sufficient for pure plays like eBay and Amazon. However, multi channel business are only able to get a myopic view by tracking online conversion and miss out on the holistic picture. A study conducted by comScore revealed that 63% of the online visitors converted offline and thus knowing the full impact of the web channel on offline sales gained precedence. This cause is further compounded by the fact that online marketers are finding it seemingly difficult to justify their online marketing budget in absence of tangible results. Tracking offline conversion which results as a fallout of online marketing efforts thus became imperative.

The following methods can be adopted to accurately track the phenomenon of delayed conversion:

Phone number tracking: Setting up separate phone numbers for each referring source (i.e websites, affiliates and online campaigns) will enable you to link the sale to its point of origin.

Unique Pricing: Offering unique prices for each online marketing campaign will help you in ascertaining the source of sale and thus help in attributing it to the respective campaigns.

Reference codes: Generating different codes for individual products or services of each campaign is an effective way to track the source of sale. This would also help in allocating suitable marketing budget for campaigns depending on their performance.

Online order forms: Giving customers the option to print out their order forms online and collect the goods from the nearby store is another effective way of linking sales to its point of origin.

Discount coupons: Offering printable discount coupons to online visitors to avail special in store offers and discounts can positively tie the sale to a particular online campaign. This will thus enable you to figure out which campaign is driving most of the offline sales.

In store surveys: Conducting in store surveys to establish the motivating element for each purchase will assist in linking purchases to online campaigns that triggered the buying decision.

Customer tagging: Customer tagging is by far the most sophisticated way of tracking delayed conversion. In this, each customer is assigned a unique ID and therefore their purchases can be tracked across various channels. This is accomplished by correlating the browser cookies with the unique ID.

A/B Testing: By studying the impact of online marketing campaigns on sales for a specific geographical location, by keeping other factors constant, is an efficient way of tracking the delayed conversion phenomena.

Pay per call services: Such services can work in tandem with your paid campaign (s) and can track conversion performance across various search engines. Service providers use many proprietary techniques to accomplish this task.

Call me back: Adding this feature to your website and embedding tracking codes will clearly establish the elusive link. Besides this, it will help your customers to seamlessly connect with your business.

Another intermediate method, which is seldom used, to track offline conversion is to run a trial campaign and then extrapolate the gathered data for future campaigns. Correlating online influence to offline sales can be attained in many more ways and is being offered by many modern statistical and analytical tools.

Tracking offline conversion is essential to realize the true ROI achieved from your online marketing efforts and should not be ignored.

When most people think of press releases, they think media attention. Press releases can also be used to gain quality inbound links to your web site, though. As part of your overall link building strategy, there are a few reasons why press release writing can be beneficial: get one way links from quality sites, earn links from sites that find you via a press release, and get placed on relevant directories that re-distribute press releases.

To write an optimized press release, start with these steps:

Define Keyword

When writing a press release, identify one keyword that you want to rank for. There are a few free tools that you can use to determine which keywords receive the most traffic, including Google Keyword External, SEO Books Keyword Tool, and ActualKeywords.com. Pick a keyword that is relevant to your site, receives a considerable amount of monthly traffic, and that will be used on the page that you are trying to rank. The keyword should ideally be in the Title of the page, in an H1 tag, included in the body, and used in your internal linking structure.

Include Keyword Throughout Release

Once you’ve identified a keyword, write out a rough draft of your press release, making sure to include the keyword throughout your release. The keyword should be included, at minimum, in the header of your press release, one to three times in the body of the release, and at least once in the “About” section of your press release.

Hyperlink Thoughtfully

For press release services that allow you to include hyperlinks within the release, make sure to hyperlink from the keyword you identified instead of using non-optimized keywords like “click here.” While not all press release services allow html or hyperlinking, most will allow you to at least include a link back to your site in a resource or contact box, or once in the “about” section.

Consider the Upgrade Option

If presented with the opportunity to upgrade, in most cases, do so. Upgrades generally offer you the opportunity to specify the anchor text of a hyperlink or in some cases, include a hyperlink that a free package doesn’t allow. Not all upgrades are created equally, though. Consider the page rank, traffic volume, trust factors, and cost when determining whether to upgrade or not.

Distribute to a Variety of Services

When submitting press releases for link building purposes, don’t submit to just one service - instead submit to a variety. Some press release sites will check to make sure that your release is unique, however, so make sure to distribute to those sites first. Start with the quality sites that have a number of links and tend to be picked up by the press; also re-write some of the verbiage in your release so as to avoid duplicate content. Simple things like re-writing the header or a few sentences within the release can make sure that your release will be picked up by a number of services.

As a small or medium business owner, you may want to advertise and promote your website as economically as possible. In recent years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as one of the surest and cheapest way for long-term business promotion.

A typical business owner is not expected to be knowledgeable about SEO and its benefits. Even if the owner knows SEO, he/she may not be sure how to choose an ethical SEO who can get the job done at the best rates and within timeline. Choosing a SEO consultant or company for your website can be a tiring and overwhelming experience. Many SEO specialists will boast about adopting the latest path-breaking SEO techniques, use testimonials from clients and guarantees of #1 placements on Google. But how can you, as a non expert, select a genuine SEO consultant? Listed below, are a few of the main pointers used to detect fake SEO consultants or fake SEO companies.

#1 Google ranking for Website:

If any company guarantees you that they can place your website in the number one position on Google, then take my advice - RUN in the opposite direction. It’s obvious this company is desperate to get business and is willing misleading you to get your hard earned cash. No company can make such claims. Google’s algorithms are one of the best kept secrets. What SEO companies can do is optimize and promote the website according to widely known principles, intelligent guess work, best practices and lots of hard work. At most a company can claim that they can acquire good rankings such as top 10 results. But even then, verify their past track record to measure how they fared with other clients.

Very Low Prices:

Many companies charge ridiculously low amount of money for a lot of services. As an astute business person, you can intelligently deduce that any work that requires hours and hours of hard work, research and analysis by a team of experts cannot come cheap. Most of the times, specialists from various fields such as programmers, content writers, SEO analyst, link builders etc. pool their resources to make a site successful on Google. Therefore quality services cannot come as cheap as many companies charge.

Secret and Proprietary Technique That Cannot be Revealed:

I don’t think we even need to elaborate on this. As the owner of the website, you should be aware of what’s happening to your site and what steps are been taken to optimize and promote it.

Recommending Black Hat Techniques:

Lot of companies recommends shady tactics known as black hat practices to get your site up in search engines. Not only do these practices have very short term benefits, but they can also be very counter productive since the search engines can eventually catch website following these practices. Many websites big and small have been heavily penalized for using such techniques. So play safe and avoid these SEO companies like the plague.

Using Outdated Techniques:

Once upon a time, techniques like reciprocal link exchange, keyword stuffing etc. were used to get good rankings. Google and other search engines have wizened up and rank a site for its worthiness and not just back links and keyword stuffing. Choose a company that will recommends steps to make your site useful & relevant and not take short cuts.

Keep these tips in mind while choosing an SEO company for your website and hopefully they will help you select an SEO company that knows their job and can handle your website promotion very well. Good luck!

Keyword professional research has been the topic which most SEO experts rave about. It’s because keyword research is the first place you need to go to create prosperous SEO campaign. It’s about finding the words that gets the interest of the reader, earning their trust and motivating them as you move through the online sales process and switch these visitors into purchasers, enquiries or sign-up’s. You can do your research tasks in just minutes with the help of user-friendly research tools like Wordtracker, Wordze and Keyword Discovery.

Unfortunately, it won’t be guaranteed that you won’t encounter challenges. Competition and traffic that are always linked, for example, if you post a business blog; you can’t expect that your work will be viewed in an instantly on the first page as visitor search “blogging”. So, you have to do the first round of research to understand your target market and how they purchase by using a diverse combination of keywords to describe them. Visitor searching for a topic may use diverse keyword or keyword combinations, and the one you find most noticeable, may in fact be the less popular terms.

Every single keyword research tools can assist you in approximation of potential market size, and provide insights into how to modify both your tactics and prospect communications to get realistic results. To be successful, you must realize the language used by your clientele, rather than the terms you consider to be most effective. It will help you in deciding a cost-effective content campaign for your blog, website or marketing materials. To get started (this makes no sense).

To help you improve your tactics in competing in the world of keyword research here are some tips which can be considered basics:

 Tip 1: Gather related terms. You can use excel spreadsheet and collect major business terms associated to your site and industry in one column. Also, consider of singular and plural versions of keywords and keyword phrases, abbreviations, misspellings and hyphenations when doing the list of probable keywords.

 Tip 2: Boost the collection of terms. We’re now bound to add entire two, three and four term combinations with those definite terms related to your site. We need to utilize web applications to speed up the entire procedure. Start typing your first general term and the tool will list more than a few related terms. Pick each new pertinent term to your sheet. You are supposed to perform this to other general terms.

 Tip 3: Look for principal and minor keywords. Key-in each of your terms when you go to the internet-based keyword creation tools such as Wordtracker etc. Locate terms like count and ratio. You must plug these on a second and third column beside the column of corresponding terms. After this step, go through your list and find the terms with the higher volume count and lower amount of competing page. This ratio is basically termed the KEI ratio. Consider the top 5-10 terms as your principal keywords and the remaining lists as your minor or ‘long tail’ keywords.

 Tip 4: Decide you topic of your writing. You may do blogs and forum postings, website page content, press releases and articles for your website or place them in the media. Also, develop a routine for posting content and being consistent. Find out where to post content for maximum visibility and what content strategy will link people to your website.

 Tip 5: Develop density of your keyword content. Density of your keyword content and finest formula or layout should be given emphasis to get the highest search ranking. It signifies that you should place as much pertinent keyword content as possible to your site. But do not spam the engines; regular consistent submission is safest approach.

 Tip 6: Adjust the existing content. Evaluate your page titles, content of the website body, Meta tags and descriptions, first sentence, etc. Make adjustments if necessary to improve your content using a specific formula.

 Tip 7: Develop new keyword dense content relevant to your site and post regularly.

This is to attract attention of viewers and major search engines. Trends, media, evolution, whatever, if you can point to it, then it causes search terms and volumes to alter online. It’s important you keep searching and revaluing your terms frequently.

Once equipped with keywords that are relevant to your market, you have the exclusive skill to generate highly-relevant content that helps your site visitors and develop your reliability because you will be satisfying their search needs. Depending on the size of your operations, keyword professional research should not require hiring additional staff, but regardless of your circumstances, keyword professional research is vital to the success of your online campaign. You will possibly rank well in search engines if you choose great keywords. It may seem bizarre to view search traffic as a minor benefit on the net, but that’s precisely how you should see it, it simply makes or breaks your success online.

With permission from the Google AdWords Guide: Novice to Expert to Superhuman - www.AdwordsCampaign.net

Most AdWords campaigns are managed poorly, through either lack of knowledge or an aversion to tedious work. This makes it possible for you to get targeted traffic extremely quickly and easily, using clever strategy together with automated tools.

3. Other Google AdWords Strategies

– Google AdWords Ad Positioning

Although the profit margin on the product or service offered is a large factor, tests have proved that the first ad position on the first page is, generally, not the most profitable. Yes, it gets the most clicks, but it’s often a spontaneous action by the surfer before studying the ad. Sometimes the surfer is merely browsing the subject and is not ready to buy (commonly known as “tyre-kickers”).

Tests show that the further down the page an ad is, or, occasionally, even on the second page, the greater is its conversion rate. The surfer has taken the time to read the ad carefully because he is ready to buy. Furthermore, the clicks are fewer; so, your overall pay-per-click bill is less than for a higher-positioned ad. The downside is that the click-through rate (CTR) of the lower-positioned ads is lower, which affects your Quality Score adversely and raises your cost per click.

A happy medium is to aim for positions 4 to 6 on Google’s first page. (You can use the “Show Estimated Ad Position” and “Estimated Avg CPC” columns in the on-line Google AdWords Keyword Tool to determine the cost-per-click to bid for each of of your exact match keyword phrases, and then you can set those bids accordingly. These figures can, however, be notoriously inaccurate. Always check your keyword phrases’ positions afterwards in the ‘Avg Pos’ column on the Ad Group’s ‘Keywords’ index tab or by testing with a search on the main keyword phrases.)

– “Google Search” ads, “Content Network” ads, “Search Network”/”Search Partners” ads, “Placement” ads

You can specify different maximum bid amounts for these various types of advertising. Because the quality of their traffic tends to be lower, bids for the Content Network (”entire network” option) and Search Network (Search Partners) (see Tactics > Search Network) should be kept lower and be more tightly controlled than those for Google Search traffic and the Content Network (”Placement ads” option). In the early stages of a new Google AdWords campaign, it is advisable to go with only Google Search traffic and switch other options off, to help you to control costs. Once you’ve discovered the keywords that produce the highest return on investment (ROI), you can enable other options for those keywords to see what results they produce.

If you find that a Google Search traffic campaign is too competitive, don’t just abandon Google AdWords altogether; try a Content Network Placement ad (see Tactics > Placement Ads), bidding either CPC or CPM (q.v.).

– Testing and Tracking

—- Ad Variations

Despite what you may think of your copywriting prowess, you will not write the perfect ad at the first attempt. You may need ten attempts before you find the best formula. Although you may hazard a reasonable guess at the advertisement text that would attract visitors, the ONLY way to KNOW what ad text achieves the highest click-through rate (CTR) is split-test two ads simultaneously.

Although changing just a single word can make a difference, do not split-test two ads that resemble each other that closely; Split-test two radically different ads. (Switch off Google’s option to show the better-performing ad more often than the other, as that would distort the test results.) After between 20 and 50 clicks it should become apparent which of the two ads is out-performing the other. Then replace the inferior ad with another and split-test again. Repeat this process again and again, each time reducing the textual differences between the two ads until you arrive at the one that performs best of all.

To track the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads, go to your Google AdWords campaign web page, click on the Campaign name; click on the Ad Group name; click the ‘Ad Variations’ index tab; check the ‘CTR’ column.

Always keep all the Ad Variations that you create, to check that you don’t repeat any inadvertently.

—- Landing Pages

Split-test your landing pages in a similar way, to discover which style, layout, text, call to action, etc. achieves the highest conversion rate. To track the conversion rates of your web pages for various keywords, go to your Google AdWords campaign web page and click on the ‘Conversion Tracking’ item on the ‘Campaign Management’ index tab.

Always save all the landing pages that you create, to check that you don’t repeat any inadvertently.

—- Keywords

After a new campaign has been running for about a month, check the click-through rate (CTR) of all the keyword phrases in each Ad Group on its ‘Keywords’ index tab. Click the ‘CTR’ column header to sort the keyword phrases, mark the checkbox of all keyword phrases with a CTR of less than 0.5% and either ‘Pause’ or ‘Delete’ them. (If you have many keywords, it’d probably be quicker to do this in your specialist AdWords software tool and upload the keyword list to your Google AdWords campaign again.)

0.5% is considered the benchmark of a poorly performing keyword. Such keywords cause your ad to be displayed but, for some reason, the people using the keyword in their search terms don’t connect it mentally with your ad, and don’t click on it. If several keywords have a low click-through rate (CTR), the overall click-through rate (CTR) of your whole Ad Group is reduced and its Quality Score will be affected adversely. Eventually, this Ad Group’s lower Quality Score will also affect the Quality Score of your entire Google AdWords campaign.

This check should be performed weekly thereafter.

If you really want to use those poorly performing keywords, remove them from the Ad Group and create a new Ad Group for them, or even a new campaign, so that they don’t affect your overall Quality Score.

—- The Bottom Line

Great importance is attached to the click-through rate (CTR), but, to put it in perspective, it is only a means to an end. A high click-through rate (CTR) does not make you a millionaire in itself; It’s revenue that counts. Your revenue is determined by the successful interaction between keywords, Ad Variation and landing page, all three working in harmony together.

– Maximum CPC Bid

Don’t be afraid to bid higher than necessary for keywords in a new Google AdWords campaign during the first few days. This will establish your campaign with Google and, as your click-through rate (CTR) rises, your maximum CPC bid amount to achieve the same ad position will fall dramatically. Then you lower your bids and check again the next day. Repeat this process until your bids are minimized. You do this for all the keyword phrases in the Ad Group. If there are too many keywords to deal with manually, invest in specialist software to calculate the bids for you.

– CPC or CPM?

Google ‘Content Network’ advertising (see Tactics > Content Network) gives you the option to specify your keywords’ maximum bids as cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) (”M” is the Roman numeral for 1,000, “mille” in Latin). CPM can be useful if the Quality Score is low or the cost per click (CPC) is high. If you opt to pay for impressions rather than for clicks, Google couldn’t care less about Quality Score or click-through rate (CTR) or even relevance; You simply pay each time your ad appears. Of course, it’s still in your interest to ensure that you follow the advice about relevance already given.

It’s your responsibility to track the performance of your CPM ads, because Google doesn’t do it for you. Obviously, you won’t want to keep paying for ads that don’t convert. Moreover, you’ll still have to bid high enough to get your ad to be displayed in the desired position within an ad unit on an AdSense publisher’s web page, or even at all, and that cost could be quite high on a good-quality, popular web site that you choose for a ‘Placement’ ad (see Tactics > Placement Ads).

– Keywords

Unless you have a six-figure annual budget and would be happy with a mere 10% return on investment (ROI), don’t bother bidding for popular 1-word keywords, such as “mortgage”. The competition for most single-word keywords is fierce, unless the niche is very esoteric. Moreover, searches on single words are made most frequently by people who are simply not ready to spend their money; they are merely investigating the market, gathering information; in other words, they are “tyre-kickers”. 1-word keywords would probably bankrupt you very quickly.

2-word keywords are a better bet, but they can still command a high cost per click in competitive markets, surfers who search on them may still not be ready to buy, although they’re getting there.

Keyword phrases of three words and up are known as “long-tail” keywords. (Note that the word “keyword” in pay-per-click advertising can mean a phrase of more than one actual word, e.g., “New York”. A “keyword phrase” consists of more than one “keyword”.)

3-word keyword phrases have the highest conversion rate, according to tests. People who type three words as a search term have usually done their investigations, know exactly what they want, and are now ready to buy.

4-word keyword phrases fare slightly less well, perhaps because the searcher may indeed be ready to buy, but is comparing prices for a very specific item, or is doing some academic research.

Don’t understimate the power of negative keywords! If you sell tulips, you don’t want your ad to appear when someone searches on the term “grow tulips”. Although they may not click on your ad, it’d be an unnecessary impression, and its click-through rate (CTR) would suffer. Specify “grow” as a negative keyword. (Of course, if your Ad Group contains only exact match keyword phrases, there’s no point in specifying negative keywords.)

– Landing Page

Relevance is covered above, and is by far the most important attribute of a landing page. Here is some advice about other ways to encourage Google to enhance your Ad Group’s Quality Score.

Google values “real” web sites more highly than mere single-page “mini-sites”. The robot checks for links to other web pages, particularly a ’site map’ page and ‘privacy policy’ and ‘contact us’ pages. A ‘terms of use’ and an ‘about us’ page may also help. Hyphenate these page names as the file names, e.g., ‘privacy-policy.html’. Place the links to these pages at the very bottom of your landing page, in the footer, using as small a font as a human would consider reasonable. You want to reduce the risk as much as possible that your visitor will click away from your landing page.

Minimize the landing page’s load time. It is believed that Google uses this as an element in its Quality Score algorithm. Keep images and JavaScript to a minimum. They weigh the page down. (Google cannot follow JavaScript links anyway.)

– How to Attract Visitors

What makes a person click on your ad instead of someone else’s? The answer is the same as to the question why a person clicks the ‘Buy’ button on your sales page: good copywriting. That’s a separate subject, but, suffice it to say here that your ad must be not only relevant, but also compelling. Imagine that you are the searcher, looking to buy a product or service like yours. Look at other ads offering something similar. What attracts you to one and not another? Ask your friends and colleagues what they think.

You have only a 25-character headline and two description lines of 35 characters each. Don’t squander them on waffling about your company. The consumer couldn’t care less about you or your company. The consumer has a problem to be solved, a need to be satisfied, a desire to be fulfilled. So, mention the problem, the need, the desire. And, most important, tell the consumer that the solution, what he needs, what he wants is only a click away. Tell him to “Get Help Now” or to “Find It Here”. That’s the ‘call to action’.

With permission from the Google AdWords Guide: Novice to Expert to Superhuman - http://www.AdwordsCampaign.net

Most AdWords campaigns are managed poorly, through either lack of knowledge or an aversion to tedious work. This makes it possible for you to get targeted traffic extremely quickly and easily, using clever strategy together with automated tools.

2. TARGETING

There’s no point in advertising anything unless the ad reaches a person who might be interested in it. That sounds obvious, but the number of advertisers who waste money on “catch-all” ads with a “shotgun” approach, hoping for the best, is astonishingly high. If you follow their example, you’ll lose a lot of money fast with Google AdWords. The secret of success with Google AdWords, as with any advertising medium, is accurate targeting. With Google AdWords, though, you can home in on your target market with pin-point accuracy.

If you sell a machine with a specific model number, that model number should be your main keyword. If you sell it only in a certain town or county, that town or county should be a keyword in the Ad Group. If it relates to a particular season or festival, that should be a keyword.

Keywords can be combined with each other or with incidental words, such as prepositions like “in”, “for”, “with”, to form 2-word, 3-word or 4-plus-word phrases in various ways and different word orders. Ideally, every conceivable phrase that a surfer might type as a search term would be desirable to have in an Ad Group as an exact match keyword phrase. Then your cost per click for each of those keyword phrases would be minimal. If you’re creating your Google AdWords campaign manually, such a task would be totally impractical, of course, if not impossible. For such jobs specialist software that applies “brute force” algorithms is a sound investment. You get what you pay for, and even the high-end software pays for itself, usually many times over.

Negative keywords have a great impact on a targeted AdWords campaign. If you sell software, for example, and don’t just give it away, you do not want your ad to appear when someone types the phrase “free software”. That might trigger an impression of your advertisement unnecessarily, thus affecting your keyword’s and your ad’s click-through rates adversely. Worse still would be if that person were to click on your ad. Yes, it’d help your CTR but you’d pay good money for a non-revenue-earning click. Specify “free” as a negative keyword, to prevent your ad from being displayed. To micro-target your market, your negative keyword list could be surprisingly large.

The same principle applies to the ad text: You don’t want freebie-seekers clicking on your ad unless you’re giving away something for nothing on your landing page. That costs you money. Don’t be afraid to target your potential customers who are prepared to pay for your product or service by making it clear in the ad text that it’s for sale and not free. Stating its price in the ad is the easiest and most succinct way to get that message across.

As well as geographic targeting, you can also make use of demographic tageting to a certain extent. Demographic targeting with Google AdWords, however, requires some judgment on your part. Use the Google AdWords “placement targeting” function (see ‘Tactics > Placement Ads’) to pick specific web sites that, in your opinion, would be visited by the kind of people you want to see your advertisement. Combine those placements with specific keywords and bids to attain the desired position for your ad on context-relevant pages on those web sites.

Here’s a summary of what happens, depending on the Google AdWords settings you choose:

– Select ‘Search’ with keywords in the Ad Group: Your ads can appear on user searches related to your keywords.

– Select ‘Search’ with no keywords in the Ad Group: Ads in this Ad Group won’t appear on search. (Keywords are needed to be matched to user searches.)

– Select ‘Relevant pages across the entire network’ with keywords in the Ad Group: Your ads can appear on Content Network pages matching your keywords.

– Select ‘Relevant pages across the entire network’ with no keywords in the Ad Group: Ads in this Ad Group won’t appear on the Content Network. (Keywords are needed for your ads to be matched contextually on the Content Network, but if you have also selected Placement targeting in this Ad Group, your ads can appear on any individual placements you selected.)

– Select ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’ with keywords in the Ad Group: Ads can appear only on the placements you choose, and only if the content of those placements matches your keywords. If your chosen placements don’t match your keywords, your ad won’t show.

– Select ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’ with no keywords in the Ad Group: Ads can appear on any of the placements you choose, regardless of relevance.