Setting Realistic SEO Expectations

Those who’ve been in the SEO biz for a number of years know how much more competitive it is these days compared to a few years ago. The number of web pages indexed by search engines has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in past years. On top of that, a good portion of site owners and webmasters know just enough SEO to be dangerous. In the golden age of SEO, the vast majority of websites hadn’t given a thought to the search engines, and when they did, it was only to place some keywords in their Meta tags. (Which, incidentally, didn’t help then either.) Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. Even competitive areas were doable with just a little more work than their non-competitive counterparts.

The Competition Is Fierce

These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell.” (As a side note, soon after writing this, I got an email from someone whose goal was to have their Flash site be “#1 in all the search engines for the word ’spring.’” I kid you not!)

Don’t get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I’m quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they’re doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wand and make it so.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Does this mean that SEO is dead?

Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most definitely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to settle for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.

Almost every time I review one of those “put me at #1″ prospects’ websites, I see tons of opportunities for fixing the site in general so that it will work better for both their users and the search engines. They are almost always so focused on their “money phrases” that they completely neglect many areas of their site. Instead they put their special phrase on every page and never research the thousands of others that are being typed into search engines every day.

Content for Content’s Sake

Another trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately is the creation of content simply for the sake of creating content. What’s that all about? SEOs certainly throw the words “good content” around a lot, but why is it that nobody seems to know what that means? We now have a whole cottage industry of companies who will allegedly write “good content” for you. Worse, there are even some that will *rent* you content! Newsflash…good content has nothing to do with the history of your products. Nor is good content a bunch of madlib spam pages where you simply substitute keyword phrases from one page into the other. Good content isn’t stuff you write for the search engines.

What Exactly Is Good Content?

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet. The key to good content is creativity. Unfortunately, creativity itself seems to be a dying art. Being creative isn’t looking at what your competitor is doing and copying them. It’s being a leader, not a follower. It’s having your own voice and your own opinions and expressing them, regardless of what others might think. It’s pouring your heart and soul into your website, not looking for the next quick fix. And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines. It’s what brings targeted traffic to our own site for thousands of phrases, and it’s what will help your site gain traffic for whatever phrases relate to it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not fast. And it can’t be done with the flick of a switch.

Determine Your True Goals

So please…if your pet phrase isn’t ranking highly enough, don’t call me and don’t email me. In fact, don’t call or email *any* SEO company. Instead of calling, you need to reassess your goals. No SEO company in the world will be able to help you unless you are ready to forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need. Read that last sentence again until you really understand it. Forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need.

Beware of SEO Companies Who Will Tell You What You Want to Hear

And remember, there are plenty of SEO companies that will say they can do whatever you want them to do. You want to be #1 for “spring”? Sure, no problem. They will happily take your money, do some work, and promptly get no results. Don’t blame them though – they were just telling you what you wanted to hear.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1950/1/Setting-Realistic-SEO-Expectations/Page1.html

Google AdSense is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs - Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.

Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad code and paste it in your site. But here’s the amazing thing - no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks can increase that amount considerably. And I should know, after learning about these tricks, I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!

The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee. You can learn all these secrets from them, as long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I’m going to share all their AdSense tricks for free. Here they are:

1) Color code your ads to match your web site palette *exactly*. Don’t use frames around your ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation interface, make sure you choose the same color as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background.

When choosing the ad heading colors, match them to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use the exact same ad background shade as your page background. Use the exact same ad text font and color as the text on your pages. You can see an example of this color-matching on my search engine advice blog - notice the 4 link ad unit and skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand side under the headings Ads by Google as you scroll down the page? The link and text colors are identical to the color palette used throughout the rest of the page.

Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can’t quite get the color matching right, use Google’s built in color palette together with the RGB to HEX or vice versa color converter on this page. That handy little tool was a life saver for me.

This is probably the one single tweak that made the most difference to my commission levels.

2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal banner style or leaderboard image ads because people are blind to them.

3) Use Google’s own AdSense optimization tips and visual heat map to assist you in deciding where on your page to place your AdSense ad code.

4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant.
This article is a good source of frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your pages that utilize those keywords. The more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay per click for it so the higher your commission on those clicks.

5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page so that the ads look like a regular part of your site. You can see an example of this on the Internet Dating Stories site where link ads are incorporated within the regular left hand navigation of the site under the heading “Sponsor Links”.

6) Use Google’s new 4 and 5 link ad units wherever possible. They seem to have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats here.

7) Place images next to your ads to attract the eyes. You can see this in place on the search engine article library page at the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to the bottom of the page. But be careful here - the use of arrows or symbols enticing viewers to click are NOT allowed by Google and publishers may NOT label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”.

Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense ads on each of your pages - 3 regular AdSense ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of these ads so they blend into your site and don’t distract from your content. Clever use of this allowance can be seen on this page about bad Internet dating stories where you see:

- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of the page under the first paragraph
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about halfway down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of the page with images above each ad.

You can also include 1 AdSense referral button in addition to the 3 other units.

9) Tailor your page content to a particular niche or focus. Page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and are therefore more likely to interest your visitors and inspire them to click. Don’t create pages merely for the sake of placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.

10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad placements, for example, “Top 5 Link Unit Blue Palette” or “Left Side Navigation Image Skyscraper” etc. Tweak, track and measure the success of each of these custom channels so you know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad formats and colors will work better than others, but you won’t know which until you test, test and test some more!

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1496/1/Top-10-AdSense-Tricks-To-Boost-Your-Commission/Page1.html

Here’s an Internet marketing observation that may shock you. The average business website has more than enough traffic to support the company’s goals — but they’re simply not capitalizing on that traffic.

I’ve worked with many clients who swore they did not have enough website traffic, based on the fact that they were getting very few leads from their website. After analyzing their website logs or analytics program, I would discover that they had steady streams of web traffic, day after day.

In other words, these folks wrongfully assumed that web traffic equals web leads. This is not the case at all. Traffic equals traffic. You don’t generate leads until you put an effective lead generation plan in place. See the mathematical equations below.

• False: Web traffic = web leads
• True: Web traffic + lead generation = web leads

I would say lead generation is the most important aspect of Internet marketing. After all, you could own three different websites, blog twice a day, and get 2,000 visitors per week. But without a lead generation plan, all that activity and traffic will do you little good.

To illustrate this point further, I’ve created a few “laws” of online marketing, based on my own experiences over the years. Apply these laws to your Internet marketing efforts, and you’re bound to generate more leads and more business for your efforts.

Internet Marketing Law #1 - Traffic is only an opportunity.
My first law of Internet marketing online states that website traffic is only that … traffic. Until something is imposed upon it, traffic will remain traffic. In order for traffic to be of value, it must be converted into something else. Hence the term, “website conversions.”

Let’s imagine you have a lemonade stand beside a busy highway. But your stand is located on a narrow shoulder of the road where there’s not enough room for cars to pull over. All day long, cars whiz by you at 45 miles per hour, but nobody stops. You have an endless supply of traffic, but your lemonade stand is a failure because nobody stops. The traffic is right there in front of you, but it might as well be a million miles away.

Opportunity only favors those who capitalize on it.

Now let’s get back to Internet marketing. If your website has plenty of traffic but no form of lead generation, then most of your traffic will pass right by … like those cars passing the lemonade stand.

So before you fall into the typical trap of obsessing over your website traffic levels, ask yourself this: “What am I doing to capitalize on the traffic I already have? How am I actively converting traffic into leads, and leads into clients?”

Internet Marketing Law #2 - Value and response are directly proportional.
In the previous “law,” we talked about the importance of a lead generation program. But equally important is the value behind that lead generation program. Your website visitors will remain anonymous until you present something useful and valuable in exchange for their action.

Keep in mind that “value” does not have to mean costly. For example, a 12-page guide on choosing the right CRM software would be very valuable to software shoppers, and many will sign up to their hands on that guide. But the guide could actually be cheap for the marketer to produce. They could simply create it in house. In this case, value is conveyed through useful information that’s beneficial to the audience.

That’s just one of many ways to add value to your offer. Whatever path you choose, remember this response goes up in proportion to the value of your offer. On the contrary, response goes down with a weaker offer.

Internet Marketing Law #3 - Attrition is your perpetual enemy.
In your online marketing program, attrition follows you every step of the way. Attrition refers to people who “drop off” along your marketing process, somewhere between first contact and client acquisition.

Usually, there are several attrition points in any marketing process. The good news is, each point of attrition can be improved – that is, you can minimize the number of losses at each step of the marketing path.

Here are some examples of online attrition points, and what you can do to reduce them.

• Attrition Point #1 – A lot of highly-qualified prospective clients may never even find your website or blog. But you can counter this by focusing on online PR and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Attrition Point #2 – Of those people who do find your website, many will leave if they don’t find anything of value. But you can counter this by constantly adding useful content and resources to your website.
• Attrition Point #3 – Of those people who (A) find your website and (B) find it useful, some will leave without making contact with you in any way. But you can counter this by using lead-generation techniques on all key pages of your website.

From this brief sample, you can see how attrition shadows all aspects of your Internet marketing program. On the positive side, you can also see that for every point of attrition, there are things you can do to increase the number of people who continue along in the process.

Internet Marketing Law #4 - Successful techniques are not successful for everyone.
An Internet marketing tactic that works wonderfully for somebody else may not work for you. On the other hand, it may work even better for you than it did for the other person.

With any marketing strategy, you have a lot of variables that affect your results. These include the makeup of your audience, the timing, and the way you execute the strategy. You never know what will or won’t work for you until you try it. So don’t let anyone tell you, “That didn’t work for me, so don’t waste your time.”

There is experimentation, and then there’s speculation. Only the former will reveal the truth.

Internet Marketing Law #5 - Technology does not change psychology.
Technically speaking, the Internet is a dynamic, ever-changing environment. But while the way we communicate online may change, the communication itself stays the same.

Regardless of how you talk to people, they are still people — and they are still motivated by the same things as before. You just have more ways to communicate with them than before. Sure, you have to adjust your message delivery to account for new technologies, but the message itself does not have to change.

Whether you communicate with people through email, a blog, a podcast or an old-fashioned sales letter, the following marketing fundamentals still apply:

• People want what’s best for them … online and off
• People will respond to well-presented offer of value … online and off
• People will ignore a weak message with no value … online and off

Technology changes the way marketers communicate with consumers. But it does not change the fundamental psychology that leads consumers to take action.

Conclusion
Remember, website traffic is only website traffic until you act upon it. To get those website visitors to act in some way, you need to create a lead-generation program based on value and incentives. Good luck with your online marketing!

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1597/1/After-SEO—The-5-Laws-of-Website-Lead-Generation/Page1.html

Step 1: Phrases that pay

Think of SEO as like cooking a meal. Keywords and keyphrases are your ingredients. Discovering phrases that pay is all about finding the right keyphrases for your business proposition, then deploying them for best effect in your site and campaign.

• Proposition development is about working out who your customers or audience are; what you can sell or promote to them online; how they will find your site; and what will convince them to do business with you.
• Keyword discovery is the first of three steps in my D–A–D keyword analysis technique. In discovery, you generate the longest list of possible search words and phrases your customers might use, with your competitors as a guide.
• Keyword attractiveness is the second D–A–D step and involves balancing keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness to determine the overall opportunity, or attractiveness, attached to each word or phrase.
• Keyword deployment is the third and final D–A–D step, where you use the principles of prominence, proximity, and density to work out how to chain, split, and splice together keywords into phrases that pay.

Step 2: Courting the crawl

Courting the crawl explains how to help Google to find your pages and index all of them appropriately, through building the right technical foundations and structure for your new or existing website.

• How Google finds. Your first important step in courting the crawl is learning how the Google spider, Googlebot, actually works and how to use sitemaps and robots.txt to initiate, control, and manage its crawl through your site.
• Setting up a new site contains vital information for new webmasters on how and where to host your site and how to select your domain name.
• Managing an existing site explains how to move your site to a new web host and/or move to a new domain without having an adverse impact on your website.
• Site structure and navigation concerns how to structure a site to the right depth and width to facilitate an effective crawl. It includes the optimization of your directory structure, file names, and file extensions.

Step 3: Priming your pages

Priming your pages covers the SEO art of page copywriting and asset optimization. This includes deploying your phrases that pay throughout your site and manipulating Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

• How Google stores. Before you can prime your pages you must understand how Google stores your content in its search index. This important chapter also covers the dreaded supplemental index and how to avoid it.
• On-page optimization is all about effective SEO copywriting of metadata, tags, page text, and other on-page elements, so that web pages are keyword rich for search engines but still read well for humans.
• Asset optimization. It is vital also to optimize the images, documents, videos, and other assets on your site. This section shows you how.
• SERPs and snippets outlines how Google displays its search results and how to manipulate the link and the snippet for your own pages, so that web surfers are enticed to click on the result and visit your site.

Step 4: Landing the links

Priming your pages is only a small part of the battle to get top rankings. By landing the links in a well-managed link-building campaign, you can go from also-ran to world champion and establish both the importance and the relevance of your site.

• How Google ranks. One of the most important sections in the book begins with an exploration of the Google algorithm (how sites are ranked or ordered within search results). It also covers PageRank, TrustRank, and text matching.
• Off-page optimization, the longest part of the book, incorporates strategies to build keyword-rich anchor-text links into your pages from other websites, so that the quality and quantity of your links exceed those of your competitors.
• What’s new in Web 2.0 explores how the emergence of hugely popular social networks has shifted the balance of traffic on the internet. The chapter specifically explains how you can use this to your advantage in your search campaign.
• Avoiding penalties is an introduction to the dark side of SEO: how to avoid using methods that could attract a Google penalty, and how to recover from and reverse a penalty if it happens to you.

Step 5: Paying for position

While 65% of people never click on paid (or sponsored) search results, 35% do. No comprehensive website promotion campaign is therefore complete without a full evaluation of paid search engine marketing.

• Selecting match drivers involves choosing the location, language, and time you want your ads to be searched in and selecting the phrases you wish to pay for (positive matches) and qualifying words you want to exclude (negative matches).
• Ad text optimization is the biggest challenge in copywriting: compelling a user to click on a link when all you have to work with are 25 characters for a title, 70 for the ad itself, and 35 for the URL. I show you how to achieve this most effectively.
• Landing page optimization. Your cost-per-click and conversion rates both benefit from well-written landing pages that deliver on the promise you made in the ad and channel the user through the rest of your site.
• Bid and campaign management is all about managing your campaigns, budget, day parting, bids, and ad variations to minimize the cost and maximize the return on investment. There’s more to it than you might think!

Step 6: Making the map

As the web gets bigger, so searches become more locally focused. This innovative step shows you how to exploit this by improving your position for locally qualified searches and on local Google instances. It also covers Google Maps and Google Earth.

• Language optimization. If your site is multilingual, it is important that Google knows this. This chapter shows you how to tag pages and individual text blocks for different languages and how to get ranked in local-language searches.
• Geographical optimization. This may surprise you, but users narrow down 35–45% of their searches to sites based in their own country. This chapter covers the key steps required to rank well in these local search instances.
• Google Earth and Google Maps. In this chapter you learn how to rank well in Google Maps and even Google Earth for local searches – a vital piece of futureproofing for the increasingly mobile web.
• Priming for local search. Many people add a place name to their regular search query. This chapter shows you how to factor this into your regular search campaign.

Step 7: Tracking and tuning
SEO is not a one-off process but an ongoing competitive struggle. You need to monitor your performance objectively, using reliable data, and feed this back into your campaign. This step shows you how.

• Google Analytics. Discover how to sign up for and use this amazing set of free tools from Google: learn how to monitor your paid and organic search traffic and track goal conversion and campaign return on investment.
• Google Webmaster Tools is the all-in-one interface for managing your crawl, monitoring your search rankings, and checking your backlinks. Google continues to enhance this now invaluable toolset.
• Other useful tools contains a round-up from across the web of tools for tracking PageRank and Traffic Rank, plus how to interpret your own website statistics. The chapter also explains how to use a Google API key, if you have one available.
• Tuning the campaign considers how to use the results of your ongoing monitoring activity to refine your campaign further and tune your site. It also looks at how to monitor what your competitors are up to and learn from them.

If you are professional with your search engine optimization efforts and keep your customer in mind before you start considering “what the search engines will think” you will reap a lot more than what you sow. Chances are, if your visitors like your website, there is a very good likelihood that the search engines will like it too.

With this in mind the following 10 tips focus on how to develop your website with your visitors in mind whilst also conducting effective search engine optimization activities.

1. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines. The words and phrases that your potential customers type into the major search engines are the keywords your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery (both offer trial versions).

However, if you want to find out accurate figures of how many people are searching for your targeted keywords per week/month/year run a Google Adwords and/or Overture campaign and you will get extremely accurate figures of search engine traffic whilst (hopefully) generating income that will pay for your research.

2. Optimize every page on your website

Optimizing each webpage is overlooked by so many websites and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as “Irish Hotels” on your home page and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as “Hotels in County Galway” on another relevant landing page. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about “Irish Hotels”.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100’s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the title description tag of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their “favorites”.

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need to put the information you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords as much as makes sense. Read what you have written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to website and article directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Links within these sites not only brings visitors to your website, but search engine “spiders” are easily able find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Saying “click here” is not enough to help visitors understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. When writing your anchor text and alt attributes you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is an important factor that search engines take into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers who can make Flash and JavaScript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put Michael Flatley and his River Dance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders have difficulty reading this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives such as static links and a site map to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results. Overuse of Flash, JavaScript, and images can also lead to your web pages being very slow to download. If these file types are used sparingly your visitors and search engines will appreciate your efforts a lot more.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis. However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis. Once you have your blog and/or forum up-and-running you should optimize them with the same professionalism you do with any other page on your website.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, “If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

Remember it’s human visitors that you are trying to impress, not search engine robots.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1512/1/10-Effective-SEO-Design-tips-to-impress-both-website-visitors-and-Search-Engines/Page1.html

With the flood of businesses choosing to advertise via Paid Search, it has become increasingly more difficult to gain the desired campaign ROI which was once so easy to achieve. The fact is, many organisations are making a number of mistakes and are not maximising there profits from Paid Search. Listed below are five ways to get the most out of your Paid Search campaigns.

1. Position one in Google isn’t always the best position to be in.

As marketers, this goes totally against our competitive nature. We all want our ads on the coveted position inside the cover of a magazine, or our TVC shown during primetime television. But the truth of the matter is that search engine advertising is different. Occupying the first ad position in Google is only important for a selection of keywords.

Generally, there are five steps to the consumer purchasing process

1. Identify a need/want which needs to be satisfied

2. Search for a solution

3. Evaluation of alternatives

4. Purchase

5. Buyers dissonance

For search engine advertising, we focus on in the middle three steps, starting with ‘searching for a solution’. Typically consumers weigh up a number of alternatives before making a purchase. Consumers will click on two-three (sometimes more) ads before evaluating alternatives.  Therefore, advertisers can avoid paying the premium of occupying position one as lower ranked ads are going to be clicked. For example, if you owned a company selling dieting books, you wouldn’t want to rank number one for the search phrases ‘how to lose weight’ or ‘diets that work’ as these are ‘searching for a solution’ based phrases.

The same applies when consumers are evaluating their alternative solutions and would apply for broad product related searches such as ‘compare diet books’ or ‘top five gyms’.  Also, when consumers are doing comparison shopping they’ll click on a number of ads to check the offerings of different advertisers - in the same way people typically don’t buy from the first shop they walk in to. For such search queries the perfect ad position is the last one people click on - not the first!

Where you do want to rank high in the search results is for purchasing keywords. For example, you would want to occupy the top positions for keywords such as ‘buy diet books’ or ‘apply gym online’.

2. Failing to apply the correct match types to keywords will hurt your ROI.

Identify the right match type for your keywords is critical to the success of your campaign. With Google there are three match types, ‘Broad’, ‘Phrase’ and ‘Exact’. Yahoo! has two types; ‘Standard’ and ‘Advanced’. Google’s ‘Broad’ and Yahoo’s ‘Standard’ match types are the default when setting up your campaigns and as the names state, they provides the ability to drive a wide range of visitors through to you website, including those you want to target and those who are less valuable. By only using broad/standard match in your campaigns, you are channeling a high number of unqualified visitors to your website which reduces your ROAS and is essentially a waste of money.

Furthermore, if you were to target using only Google’s ‘Exact’ or yahoo’s ‘Advanced’ match there is the potential that you are neglecting qualified traffic which will be snatched up by your competitors.

By analysing your keywords and using the suitable match type, you are ensuring that you are driving quality traffic to your website which will convert.

3. Failing to include negative keywords will also hurt your ROI.

Negative keywords play a vital part in controlling the quality of the traffic being driven via your campaigns. Negative keywords can be either associated with the keywords that you are targeting within your campaign, but are not resulting in conversions, or keywords which when combined with your keywords have a different meaning e.g. you are a educational institution and targeting keywords such as ‘degree’, ‘courses’, ‘study’ etc… you would have the negative keywords ‘free’, ‘fake’, ‘buy’ as negatives . By using negative keywords, you are weeding out irrelevant searches and saving your budget for qualified traffic.

4. Having too broader ad groups makes it hard to target customers.

Simply put, your ads must match the keywords your customers are searching for. If your ads do not contain your keywords or there relevant synonyms then your ads will not appear relevant to your customers and will not stand out against the competition. This is magnified by the fact that when an ad contains the keywords a customer use within a search the matching keyword is highlighted in bold.

5. Test, test, then test again.

Testing variations of your ads is critical to your campaigns success. Starting with totally different ad copy and working through to the finer details can drastically improve your ROI. By testing your ads ‘call to action’, titles, the two lines of copy, and display URL you can fast discover what catches your customers eye and what doesn’t.

The bottom line is that by keeping a close eye on your Paid Search campaign and constantly tweaking all of its aspects both large and small you will provide the best possible chance of driving the right kind of traffic to your website.  However, in order to maximise your ROI from Paid Search requires investing a lot of time & effort into proactive & continuous campaign management. If you don’t have the time available or specialist skills necessary then it should be outsourced to specialists. So if you are taking a set and forget approach to Paid Search, perhaps it’s time to reassess your strategy. Otherwise you are wasting your time and money

source : http://www.surefiresearch.com/pay-per-click/five-ways-to-improve-the-performance-of-your-paid-search-campaign/

Keywords or phrases are the ‘words’ searchers type into the search engine box when they are looking for information regarding a particular topic, products, services or information. Optimising your site for the ‘right’ keywords can be the difference between a few customers and lots of customers. It’s great to rank in the number 1 position for a search phrases but if it’s not the ‘right’ search phrase (ie one people are actually using) there is virtually no benefit for you. Here are 8 tips to get you started on good quality keyword research.

1. Think outside the square and leave no stone unturned!

Make use of every source available to you for ideas – start with your own list then ask friends, colleagues and customers for their input, use suggestion tools (eg Google Suggestion Tool), your site web logs for your web traffic and if you have them the logs for the search function on your site itself will give you customized and valuable insight only you will have into exactly what your customers are searching for.

2. Relevancy is the key to success

Never try keywords that are not relevant for your site. Sure you are going to increase the traffic to your site, but will this traffic convert? NO. At best you’ll annoy your customers and at worst you’ll annoy the search engines!

3. Talk your target audience’s language

Consider the language your target audience actually uses rather than what you or others in the business might think they should search for.. It’s of no benefit ranking for “jandals” if all your customers are searching for “thongs”. Likewise, there it is pointless using industry jargon if your customer does not understand these terms. Consider that most people use natural language when they search and they typically include 2-4 keywords in their search phrases.

4. Check the numbers !

There is a range of tools available online to investigate search volumes (although some are arguably better and more accurate than others). Google, Yahoo! And Microsoft all have excellent free resources for this or for a paid subscription both Keyword Discovery or Word Tracker provide excellent data.

5. Paid Search will give you a helping hand

If you’re still not happy with the results (or need ‘real’ stats to convince a key stakeholder) a ‘trial’ pay per click campaign can be an excellent way to get real data for your local market about what people are searching on, which results they click through from and most importantly which keywords or phrases convert to paying customers!

6. Focus, focus, focus !

Once you’re at the stage of allocating words to pages remember that a page will only rank well for 1-2 key phrases. If during your research you have identified particular keywords or phrases that could have real value but you can’t seem to fit them anywhere you might want to consider developing additional pages focused specifically on these topics. Just remember to link these pages within your site structure – they should not be stand alone pages otherwise the search engines may not be able to find them or other pages on your site!

7. Revise on a regular basis

Keyword research is not a do it once and forget it task – you will likely have to fine tune and repeat over time as markets trends emerge, terminology changes, websites are updated, new products are launched etc.

8. Preactice makes perfect !

It does not have to be perfect first time – better to have your site improved from no keyword research optimisation to some optimisation rather than doing nothing until you feel you have ‘finished’. Doing the hard work at the start and regular fine-tuning of your keyword strategy will provide you with the best possible chance of driving the right kind of traffic to your website.  However, if you don’t have the time available or do not feel you have skills necessary then this job should be outsourced to specialists.

source : http://www.surefiresearch.com/search-engines/8-keyword-research-tips-for-seo/

When it comes to ecommerce sites, there are plenty of keywords to choose from. Because sites typically follow a fairly set format, numerous pages are created between the home page and the order confirmation page. Those pages all need keywords and phrases if they are going to rank high in the search engines. So, how exactly do you choose the best keywords for each page? Here’s an easy strategy to follow. (Please keep in mind that all keyphrases used in this article are for example only and have not been researched.)

When you start out, use keywords and phrases that are descriptive of your overall site. For example, if you sold clothing for the entire family, you might opt for phrases such as “ladies clothing,” “men’s clothing” or “kids clothing.” Those would be expressive, but could also be worked easily into the home page copy.

Think of the sales process as a funnel. It’s broad at the lip and gets more narrow as you move closer to the spout. The same goes for the keyword strategy: broad keyphrases at first and more specific ones as the subject matter gets more specific.Once you move to the category pages, you’ll want to select keyphrases that work well with what you’re trying to describe in your copy. If your visitor clicks on the women’s shoes category, she’ll want to read about and see pictures of women’s shoes. Perhaps you’ll use phrases such as “fabric ballet flats” or “leather peep-toe pumps.”

I typically create a paragraph at the top of the page, then add a descriptive sentence or two under each image. Sometimes, I’ll also add a paragraph of copy at the The product description pages should incorporate long tail keywords that are laser specific. If your visitor clicked on a link for “Bermuda shorts” on the category page, you’ll want to get as detailed as possible, so your customer can make the decision to buy.

For instance, a keyphrase such as “Liz Claiborne pastel plaid Bermuda shorts” would be perfect for a product description because it is… well… descriptive. Long? Yes, it is a long phrase. Most long-tail keywords will be. But the further into the sales process a customer gets, the more specific their searches will be. Chances are, someone who has decided she wants pastel plaid shorts will use a phrase like the one above instead of something like “Bermuda shorts.”Here’s a plus: Because long-tail phrases are much less competitive than broader terms, you stand a better shot at getting ranked highly for them. Here’s where some copywriters get confused. When you use links in anchor text, you’re giving credit to the page being linked to.

For instance, if you have a category page for shorts, you would want to use the keyphrase “Bermuda shorts” in the anchor text of a link that pointed to the Bermuda shorts page. That way, the Bermuda shorts page gets credit for the link. The link would be of no (or very little) value to the general shorts page. When you take note of the navigation and purchase cycle of your visitors, you begin to see why this simple strategy for keyword placement works so well. Using more specific terms as you write more specific copy helps usher visitors from the front door to the checkout counter with ease while also boosting your search engine rankings.
Source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/articles/1861/1/A-Simple-amp-Effective-Keyword-Strategy/Page1.html

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questions:

1)What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.
2)What is the time-frame for this project?
3)What is the budget for this project?
4)Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

Get Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site’s search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.

Get Set: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1)What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2)What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3)Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).

4)Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5)How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6)Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be opt

imized?

7)Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps?

What is the current link popularity of the site?

9)What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10)Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11)Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12)What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13)What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14)What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

15)What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16)Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17)Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
18)Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19)How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20)What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.

Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle the job!

Source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1731/1/20-Things-You-Need-to-Know-Before-Optimizing-Your-Site/Page1.html

Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.

Small sites typically don’t need a site map so long as all pages are linked in the main navigation. Once you get into main and sub-navigation menu’s then site maps are helpful in allowing search engines and visitors to quickly find anything they are looking for within just a couple of clicks. A single site map can be used for both purposes or multiple site maps can be created. Here we’ll address creating site maps for spiders and humans separately.

Site Map For Spiders

.xml file

An .xml document should be added to your site’s root directory containing links to all site pages. This .xml file should then be referenced should be compiled and placed into a proper .xml document which should be uploaded into the root directory.

Robots.txt file

With your .xml site map file in place you must then make it accessible to search spiders. Reference the site map in your robots.txt file by adding a line for sitemap: URL (example: sitemap: http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/sitemap.xml)

Keep current

Be sure that your .xml file is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site. Large sites should i

mplement an automated site map update monthly or even weekly or daily.

Site Map For Visitors

Navigation links

A site map designed for human visitors is just like any other website page. Link to the site map page should be included in the primary navigation or the site’s global footer. Visitors should be able to find this link without too much searching.

Additional page links

Site map should also be linked from various pages within the site such as Help pages and your custom 404-redirect page. This helps point visitors to the site map as a quick and easy means to find what they need.

Overview

It’s helpful to provide a short overview paragraph at the top of your site map page. This can be a nice introduction should someone land on this page directly from a search engine or elsewhere.

Heading and layout

The layout of the site map should present a clear visual hierarchal structure or your website. Both headings and sub-headings should be used above properly grouped links.

Text links & descriptions

Site map should primarily use textual links and page should not be cluttered with images or other distractions. It is also a good idea to provide an additional short description (provided there is room) for each link that allows the visitor to better understand where each link will take them.

Keep current

Be sure that your site map is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site.

As I said above, not every site needs a site map. But those that do should be sure that the site map(s) they create are actually benefiting them. And the best way to do that is to make sure your site maps provide maximum usability for visitors and search engine spiders.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1800/1/9-Tips-for-Creating-a-Site-Map-for-Visitors-and-Spiders/Page1.html