Search Marketing Answers

So Adobe and Google have announced that Google is now crawling and Indexing Flash content.  You can read Vanessa Fox’s write up with details here at search engine land.  This is yet the latest attempt by Adobe to snow-job designers and developers.  Ever since they first claimed to add “SEO friendly” capabilities several versions ago, I’ve laughed at such nonsense.  But now that Google is on the marketing hype bandwagon with this, I’m dismayed because I know most people won’t bother to investigate the limits and the implications of those limits and I’m appalled at Google’s complicit behavior…

Even though they state the limitations if you look closely enough, the marketing juggernaut has already taken it’s toll in countless news sites and tech sites reporting only the spin, or glossing over the limits.

Here are just a few of the most important reasons why it’s still a bad idea to try and create any deep content rich web site in Flash if you care about search engine optimization through on-site methods.

• 1.  No Meta Data
• 2.  No capacity to distinguish text formatting (so no h1, no bold, or strong, or italics, no bullet points, none of it.)
• 3.  You have to create your flash file in a way that results in having a separate URL associated with every major piece of content in the Flash file.
• 4.  You can only have one page Title if the entire site is in Flash so how are you supposed to optimize a 50 page site built entirely in Flash when you only have ONE page title?
• This is now leaving the door wide open for black hat hacks to stuff text into their Flash file for search engine indexing purposes and where a site visitor will NOT be able to tell such text is there, and where through the use of FLV and images, they can present you with whatever BS they want, and Google will have NO WAY to know.

 Do I really need to go on here people?

Google’s response to such concerns is essentially “this is the same issue with PDF documents, and we index those, so what’s the problem?”

OH MY GOD.

How many web sites that do really well in the search engine results are made up of 50 pages that are all PDF documents?

Sure,  if you have a sufficiently optimized HTML page that happens to link to a PDF document, and where that PDF document’s focus is related to the page from which it is linked, a search may bring that PDF back in the results.

But we’re not talking about one page content here, we’re talking about entire web sites.  That need to have dozens or hundreds of keyword phrases, grouped into tiny bite-size chunk groups of three or four phrases per page.  And where every page’s connection from an optimization perspective to each other page’s relevance relationship matter.

So Adobe and Google, as much as I love you both, do everyone who is less intuitive and visionary as I am (having known every time they have claimed Flash is a viable solution for SEO that they were full of it) a favor and be more forthcoming about the severity of these still existing limitations.

8 Key Points To Proper Site Design for SEO

Things You Should Know Before A Site’s Final Mapping Is Completed

If you are considering a redesign to an existing web site or creating a brand new site for the first time, there are some fundamental rules to every web site’s design and development strategy that need to be considered if you are to obtain maximum Search Engine Optimization value.

This page describes the most fundamental standard site architecture, content and design aspects related to the SEO process. If any one of these aspects is not implemented, the result will mean more time, energy, and effort will need to be applied to other SEO techniques.
______________________________________________________________________
1. Macromedia Flash & SEO
While Macromedia Flash allows for a very aesthetically pleasing site, it’s by far the most difficult presentation from an SEO perspective. Even in it’s current version, Flash offers very little truly high quality ways in which to incorporate SEO techniques. Unless a web site can garner thousands of links back from high quality web sites, it’s almost impossible to get a Flash based site into high ranking at Google.

At the same time, incorporating elements of Flash can be acceptable from an SEO perspective. Flash however can not be used for main site navigation or for conveying any truly important or keyword related content.
______________________________________________________________________
2. Use of Images For Content
Similar to the Macromedia Flash issue, any time graphic elements are used for textual content, the SEO value of that information is for the most part, lost. While every image on the site can have an alternate text attribute where you can describe the contents or purpose of the image these fields should normally be limited to 10 words or less. We also have the ability in one of the most common SEO techniques, to seed some of the keywords into these spaces, so that further reduces the flexibility of using alternate text attributes related to whatever a graphic image’s purpose is.
______________________________________________________________________
3. Depth of site.
While a site that’s only four or five pages, when properly seeded, can do quite well in the search engines, it’s always better to have more content spread among more pages. With every additional page that contains at least a few paragraphs of content, we can increase the total number of pages indexed at Google as well as the ranking weight for every other page on the site. To this end, it is important to come up with a site flow that allows for such growth, even if the initial site starts with only a handful of pages.

Also, any page on the site should never be more than two clicks down in the chain. Making a site too layered harms the SEO value of each sub-page.
______________________________________________________________________
4. Length of content
No single page should have any less than three or four paragraphs of content. As a general rule, each paragraph or every alternating paragraph should incorporate one or more of the keywords specific to that page, but not necessarily entire phrases. We don’t want to alienate the reader, or go overboard. So this is a balancing act.

This is important to note because any single page should have between three and five keyword phrases at most. So if my work reveals a total of 15 high priority phrases, and another 10 very good phrases due to the competitive opportunity, that’s a total of 25 phrases that need to be split down into groups of three to five per page.

Because of this, it would be most beneficial to all of us if we are able to do the keyword selection process before the content is written. This aspect is the most important in the entire SEO process, and the more we can sync each page’s phrase group with the content you write, up front, the less effort we’ll both need to make.
______________________________________________________________________
5. Location Location Location
For web sites that represent a business enterprise focused on attracting local or regional clients or customers, the office location(s) address(es) need to be seeded throughout the site. The more pages on the site that have a business address, the better our opportunity for getting higher ranking in the Google Local listings.
______________________________________________________________________
6. Professional Services Web Sites
Every major topic related to a professional practice should have it’s own web page. This relates to the keyword phrasing limitations as well as the amount of content, as well as the overall number of pages on a site.

Examples: For doctors, this means a separate page for each type of major procedure performed. For attorneys, every area of Practice needs its own page.
______________________________________________________________________
7. Videos and SEO
I’ve just recently performed an exhaustive effort related to Video SEO Best Practices for a site I’m now tasked with doing the SEO work for that specializes in Travel Video sharing and blogs. If video files or clips will be presented on the site, there are a number of tasks that should be performed specific to these files for SEO value. The very first is when the video is produced or digitized, it needs to be properly seeded with appropriate keyword phrases at the code level.

If you are not familiar with Video file MetaData, this is where the person who edits or digitizes the video embeds things such as a title, description, keyword tags, creation date, and other information right into the video file through a software process.

So the Video’s MetaData should most definitely be embedded with the SEO track in mind. The Title should include the keyword phrases most appropriate for the video, and the keyword phrases should go through the SEO analysis process given how massive the online video market is.

The web page such videos appear on should then properly match that MetaData in all aspects (page title, keywords, textual content describing the video, etc…) No less than a full paragraph should be on the page associated with that video as well…
______________________________________________________________________
8. Site Architecture - Link Name and URL Issues
To get maximum SEO value, it is vital that a site’s Link Naming and URL structure is one that is human readable and embedded with keyword phrases. In the blog world, a link name and URL done this way is said to have a “permalink”. (Permanent Link).

The more closely a page Title and Keywords match the Page URL and the link name to that URL, the more exponentially we gain SEO value. The more we do this, the longer the page will rank high for these phrases (permanent link value!)

For example My site - www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com - there’s a page with a link titled “Affordable SEO Services”. Note how the Link Title is not just “Services”. That’s because One of my most important phrases is “affordable SEO Services” .

Then - if you look at the page’s actual URL it’s

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/Affordable-SEO-Services/

So there’s a folder in my site’s directory where that folder is actually called “Affordable-SEO-Services” and the page it points to is an index.cfm file in that folder! A non SEO optimized version of this would have been

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/services.cfm

or

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/page2.cfm

and a semi optimized structure would be http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/services

This issue applies for every type of site out there. Marketing sites, ECommerce Sites… No longer is a page URL like www.whatever.com/shop/PID=345&cat=29 any good to us even though Google can read those pages.

I’ve seen countless blog posts, discussion forum threads and SEO “expert” articles where the author claims that it takes weeks or months to get a site indexed at the search engines. Well I beg to differ.

My brand new site, “Hey Dude Where’s My Site“, went online this past Thursday. I didn’t submit it to Google until tonight, when I posted a sitemap.xml file for it using the Google Webmaster tools. Within a half hour, not only were the first couple pages showing up for site:www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com, but it’s already coming up on the first page of Google for my geo-location based terms.

• affordable SEO services San Francisco # 5 (my blog comes up #4)
• SEO services Marin #5 (my blog is at #6)
• affordable SEO services Marin #1 (my blog is #2)

____________________________________

Getting Indexed at Google in under week is NOT a big deal.

First, anyone who writes even this simplest of clean web sites with content valid to the SEO work, and who submits their sitemap.xml file through the Google Webmaster Tools program, can have their new web site indexed just as fast, as long as the site does not violate Google’s acceptable site policies as deemed such through the Google system.

I’ve had this same rapid result with every brand new site I have been the manager for over the past couple years.

And as for the position I have - these may or may not remain in their positions.  And because of the narrow focus (Marin and San Francisco based phrases), there’s almost no competition beyond a few thousand pages).

The only sites I link from are my blog and my LinkedIn page so far. I don’t yet have half the pages online that the site will eventually have. So it’s really just a work in progress and I haven’t put in a tiny fraction of the optimization work I will have when I’m done. (Heck, not that Google cares, but I don’t even have my brand new logo on the site yet!)

So it’s just a site in its’ infancy. With just two back-links.

Yet nevertheless it IS in the Google index, and it is already showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Speaking of LinkedIn, (see my last Online Marketing post), I was a guest expert for Nance Rosen on her Entrepreneur Hour Business radio show this past Friday. And yes, the topic was SEO.

_____________________________________

It also comes on the heals of my having been interviewed a few weeks ago by Tracey Dowe, a business success coach in Great Britain, but that was recorded, and made available to her clients. It’s actually the first time I was interviewed during a live broadcast related to my line of work, though I had been a radio guest a few years back for a radio show related to how people of different personalities relate to each other in situations such as business.

_____________________________________

So this wasn’t the first time around for me, yet I never go into these situations with arrogance. The fact is, no matter how fortunate I have been that so far I’ve never failed to get any of my clients web sites onto the first page of Google in the organic listings for several keywords, not even I can guarantee such results every time for every phrase. And just as importantly to me, exactly how much can any one person, expert or otherwise, communicate about our complex and challenging world of optimization when give a total of 20 minutes of air time?

Fortunately Nance is a seasoned radio host, (and author and motivational speaker and… and…) prepped me by asking me what the top eight questions were where the answers would sum up the demystification of search engine optimization.

_____________________________________

Of course, I came up with more than a dozen questions the Nance might choose from, in addition to any she might have already had, and that was just scratching the surface. hahaha. Oh well - we focused on enough of them to not only fill that initial 20 minutes, but the segment of the show I was on actually went into an additional session. So with commercials, the entire piece ran just under 45 minutes.

My phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook since Friday, but then again, I didn’t provide my phone number - just links to my blog and my new showcase web site for affordable SEO and Online marketing services - www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com (to help small business owners who couldn’t otherwise afford professional SEO but who deserve world class solutions nonetheless).

_____________________________________

As is typical of my life, the Hey Dude site was literally two days before the show, just a vision in my mind. So I had to rip out a site in only a few hours. And since I’ve been coding in HTML since the beginning (1995), I had to rip it together from scratch. crudely as I do given I put in very little time with CSS. So the site itself has lots of old-school table structure.

And I only this week hired a talented graphic designer to create a logo for me.

But at least the very basic info on SEO and Online Marketing information is on the site and was ready for the radio show.

_____________________________________

And even if I never get a single client from that opportunity, it’s one more chance I was given to share with business owners and managers my insight into what they need to be aware of related to our industry - which is enough so that they won’t get ripped off or hoodwinked. And they may just have a little more respect for how much work it takes.

As a person who not only helps my clients become more successful through online marketing initiatives, but who also takes my own advice, I try to allocate time ch week to participate in the online discussions and expert Q&A sections of a number of web sites. One of these is LinkedIn - a site that some people refer to as “The Facebook for business people”…

I really like the LinkedIn site, from it’s intuitive navigation, to the handful of services they provide for business networking online. So out of all the sites, user forums, discussion areas, and expert advise web sites I participate in, LinkedIn is the one I put the most energy into. Mostly in reading, and when appropriate, responding to questions submitted by other members, in a wide swath of topics, including internet marketing, search marketing, web development, and project management.

______________________________________

I don’t answer questions that I don’t believe I have something to offer value in a response to. This is in comparison to a number of “experts” who provide answers just for the sake of gaining expert status. They’re obvious to spot. Typically a very serious business question is posed. There will be any where from a few to a few dozen replies, most of which are chock full of insight, opinion, recommendations, and guidance.

Then you’ll see among them, an answer like “n/a” or “don’t know”…. Hello? If you don’t know, or the question is “not applicable”, then do you really think that you are contributing positively to the discussion, or to aiding the member who posed the question? So it’s plain to see, especially when the same “expert point seekers” answer question after question the same way…

As a result, I do what I can to give even more valuable responses to some questions.

______________________________________

In any case, one of the questions posed this past week was Which ISPs place no limits on how many emails you can send at once.

Now, the truth is, there can be many very good, and valid responses to this question. Whether it’s related to actually providing links to ISPs that provide no such limits, or the reason why they do, or even how to “work around the system” when an ISP does place those limits…

My answer was actually more of a response to a previous person’s answer than anything. They recommended setting up your own mail servers and doing it all in house.

______________________________________

So my answer spoke to why, in my opinion, that solution is probably not the wisest, most cost-efficient choice. Rather than going into the entire response here, if you happen to be interested in why it’s probably not wise to run your own mail server for mass mailing purposes, I invite you to read my blog post on the subject.

______________________________________

Anyhow, to make what has now become a long blog post just a little longer, when I got home the other night, I found a message in my in-box from Trevor Levine, the LinkedIn member who actually posted the question.

Trevor thanked me for my response, saying:

“I think your response was the most helpful… I am writing an ebook called “Explode Your Sales From Emails”. I wanted to see if I could reprint your post in my ebook, provided that I include your contact information.”

______________________________________

Well heck! Of course I sent a reply with my permission! Are you kidding? I’m flattered that Trevor, a Marketing professional, found my answer so helpful as to not only be the MOST helpful, but also worthy of inclusion in his upcoming eBook!  (Answer since removed from LinkedIn as it will now be part of an eBook)

It only makes sense that I would want to have my views, which I happen (oddly enough) to consider helpful to small business owners, shared in any way possible. The more people I might help, the more joy I receive. And surely it can’t hurt to have a reference about my business knowledge circulating out in the world - can it? After all, isn’t that part of PR? And doing it through an online path is therefore online marketing also.

______________________________________

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve had a request of this nature. Just recently, I was invited to participate in a Skype phone interview that will be turned into a podcast and featured on a business consulting company’s web site, for their clients and site visitors - with the market being small business owners.

I’ve also been interviewed on the radio a few years back, and my perspective has been featured in news articles in the print media a couple times over the years as well.

Yet it’s always beyond a blessing when someone else finds what I have to offer to be credible enough for these opportunities…

Sending out email to thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of recipients can be a very effective way to get new business, keep existing clients thinking about you, and bringing repeat business back. Before you can even consider what your mailing should say or look like, what offer(s) you want to make to recipients, how often to send them out, or any of the other “time of mailing” issues, you need to first find the most cost-efficient way to send the email out. Then you need to know how you’re supposed to determine the effectiveness of the mailing.

In the age of spam, there are definitely right and wrong ways, as well as very efficient and also very costly ways as well.

Bulk Email - A Brief History

When the concept of sending out large amounts of email to lists of recipients first emerged in the early days of the Internet, the earliest solutions came from software that allowed you to set up and send your mailings from the comfort of your own computer. There were no limits on the size of the lists, what should or should not have been included, or any rules about what qualified as spam.

That was because spam didn’t exist as a concept until those first solutions really gained in popularity. Combine software that lets you send out tens or hundreds of thousands of email messages at one time with mailing lists provided to you where you personally had no prior contact with the recipient, let alone knew whether they had any desire to receive your mailing, and spam was born.

___________________________________________

Government Regulation

As the problem grew severe, the U.S. Government stepped in and in 2003 issued the CAN SPAM act. This regulation stipulates several requirements that email must follow in order to not be deemed as spam.

The problem with this of course, is one of enforcement and compliance oversight. There are just too many originators of email, and too little willingness on the part of mailers or too little knowledge of the rules.

___________________________________________

Industry Self Regulation

So in recent years, the major service providers including Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo and others, stepped it up and began writing software to specifically look for email that would potentially be considered spam according to their own corporate view. Smaller mail server owners also got into it as well. And if any of them deem that an email coming from your mail server is spam, you can now see your mail server “black listed”. Meaning that from that point forward, either temporarily, or permanently, any email from that same source would be blocked. Regardless of whether it is spam or not.

___________________________________________

Why Not Manage The Service Yourself?

Why not just get your own mail servers? Or pay your current Web Hosting or Web Site Developer to let you use their servers? Or use one of the top ten Free Email Providers services?

Setup, Maintenance and Compliance Costs

Setting up your own mail servers is proably not the most cost efficient means of sending out regular mailings to large volumes of recipients any more. Between the costs of the hardware, software and IT infrastructure both in initial costs as well as ongoing, plus having to set your system up so that every mailing complies with the CAN-SPAM act as well as the ever changing rules of the major ISPs, it’s too cost-inefficient.

Outgoing Email Limits To GMail, MSN, Yahoo Mai, AOL Mail, Comcast, RoadRunner…

Every major service provider allows you to set up mailing lists, but they all now “meter” or “throttle” your alloted mailing capacity. This means that if you try to send one email to more than 10 or 15 or 25 recipients at one time, their systems will often obliterate the email after the first X recipients.

___________________________________________

The Answer - Compliance Based Mass Mailing Solution Providers

In order to help resolve the problem of legitimate business owners having their mailings trigger blacklisting flags, service providers have cropped up recently where their sole or primary function is to give you the ability to set up mailings, maintain mailing lists, and send out mass email, while ensuring your mailings comply with the CAN SPAM act regulations as well as the anti-spam policies of the major service providers.

Two of these that I routinely recommend to my clients are Constant Contact and Vertical Response.

I manage many of these accounts on behalf of my clients, and have trained several others in a very short time-frame how to manage it themselves.

Constant Contact, among other similar service providers, does one thing as their primary business. Mass Email Campaigns. Some of my clients have upwards of 50,000 to 60,000 subscribers. With Constant contact and Vertical Response, these top clients send out as many as one or two mailings every week, without problems.

___________________________________________

They Do All The Heavy Lifting For very low fees

Constant Contact does all the work - and when you send out a mailing, their system sends it out in batches. Every mailing implements every single requirement to comply with the CAN SPAM act and meets all the top providers guidelines. When those guidelines change, it’s seamless to you, and you don’t have to do anything different.

So for one small monthly fee, you can send out as many mailings as you’d like. (Although it is not wise to ever send out more than perhaps two mailings a week - one a week being ideal from both safe-best practices as well as ideal brand building)

___________________________________________

Effortless List and Campaign Management

You can split your list into multiple groups, and every time a mailing goes out you can not only see how many people got the email, but how many opened it, how many clicked on each link in the email itself, anyone that unsubscribes does so from within the email and the lists are updated automatically. You can see how many formerly good email addresses are now bad, and so much more…

It’s infinitely more cost effective and prudent to use such services.

Constant Contact and Vertical Response have different pricing models, but otherwise both are highly effective and offer both pre-designed mailing wizards as well as the ability to create completely custom email.

As a member of the web site optimization and internet marketing profession, I am constantly helping clients avoid scams. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some even make me sick. Their deceptive, manipulative methods are a blight on our profession. Tonight I was on LinkedIn, where I look to answer legitimate questions regarding areas I specialize in. I saw a question entitled

Get 1 Million Real Visitors For Free!

Of course, I knew it for what it was without having to read the “question”, but of course, I love seeing the newest spin on the oldest scams… Here’s what the person who sumbitted it wrote as the details to the “question”:

The operative words here as far as I am concerned are “REAL visitors to your site”.

So just to confirm my intuition, I went to the site listed. Before I did, I made sure my McAfee SiteAdvisor browser tool was operating properly (a great free tool that shows the status of a site you’re visiting on your browser’s status bar - green is safe, yellow is questionable and red is dangerous. In this case, the site was “safe”, but only because they don’t have hidden software ready to automatically download without your knowledge…

And here’s what this site says about “how it works”:

So is this really a scam? Or should I get sued for even putting this up on my blog?

Now why would I slam this guy’s posting at LinkedIn, and why would I label it as a scam, deceptive and manipulative? After all, I have no desire to be slapped with a lawsuit for libel or slander right?

Well let’s consider the posting. It was at LinkedIn, and the category was in the Internet Marketing category. I suppose if there was a category for “Click fraud” or “Shady ways to get millions of visitors that don’t really come to your site for any other reason than to build your traffic statistics”, I wouldn’t have a problem here.

__________________________________________________

So if all you want is to get people to show up at your web site for 15 seconds then leave, then I suppose you can if you want to. but obviously if you want people who are going to come to your site to buy your products or hire you for your services or read your blog or participate in your social network in an interactive and return-visit way, then the offer is most definitely in my opinion, deceptive and manipulative.

  __________________________________________________

 Update:  when I saw this question posted and did my research, I felt obligated to supply an “answer”, to help warn potentially unsuspecting small business owners who might see it and out of desperation, think they should participate.  I essentially said what I say here, but in a synopsis.  I also flagged the question to alert LinkedIn staff to this issue.

It’s now two hours after the original question was posted and I am happy to report that that question is “no longer available”.

Do you want to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue? How much would you spend to pay for a single display ad in a newspaper for just one day? Or for an ad in a magazine that may or may not be seen by some fraction of your prospective market? A lot more over time than it costs to use PPC if you use it wisely.

___________________________________________________

You see them every time you do a search.

Sponsored Ads.

You know - those ads at the top of most search engine results pages and/or down the right side of those pages.

“Sponsored” meaning that someone is paying Google (AdWords) or Yahoo (Yahoo Search Marketing) or Microsoft (MSN Live) money for their ad to come up in such a prominent location on the search engine. Above millions of other listings.

___________________________________________________

So what does it cost, and is it worth it?

Well, the cost is “Per click”. You pay the search engine company only if someone actually clicks on that link to go to your web site. And it’s on a “bid” process - whereby three, five, fifty or several hundred companies all want to be listed for a particular search phrase. Some are willing to pay more than others. Others just want to be found, even if it means their ad comes up on the 2nd page or the 3rd page. So they pay less.

In all my years of managing pay per click advertising accounts for clients, whether they be luggage retailers, artists, lawyers, jewelry makers, personal coaches.. I have seen the cost per click for being in the top results of sponsored ads range anywhere from a few cents per click all the way up to $97 per click. The more fiercely competitive the industry, the more money that is at stake to get just one customer or client, the higher the cost per click.

So in an industry like luggage, the cost could typically be anywhere from $1 per click up to $6 or $10, depending on the particular search phrase or the time of year. (Winter holidays the cost goes up of course).
For attorneys where one client can generate millions of dollars in jury awards, it’s in the $60 to $100 range usually. For a personal coach or event planner, it can be 25 cents a click up to a couple dollars or so.

___________________________________________________

Can I afford this?

Okay - so if I advertise in the sponsored listings, and if each click through to my site costs me $1, will this cost me thousands of dollars every month? The good news is that you can set a maximum you are willing to spend on any single click, or as a total within a day or month.

Actually it’s not such a cut and dried thing.Just because someone comes to your web site doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed that they’ll buy. First, was your selection of keyword phrases and your ad copy chosen to target your ideal prospective client or customer? And once they were at your web site, is your site so compelling that more people than not actually stay long enough and feel motivated enough to convert to a sale?

___________________________________________________

So how do I succeed with PPC advertising?

The process of creating a successful advertising campaign with PPC advertising is a vast and potentially all consuming one, and there are not specific hard and fast rules that fit every situation.

But generally, there are some pretty common factors, a little of which I have already touched on above. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive book-length answer here, I’ll instead provide a bit more clarity here, and leave it up to you to choose to find out more if you’re still intrigued by the possibility.

___________________________________________________

AD CAMPAIGN QUALITY

Choose the absolute best keyword phrases.

Sometimes this means choosing a phrase that is searched less often than others, but where there is less competition among advertisers, and thus the cost is less to get you higher up in the positioning of your ad.

Fewer high quality phrases is sometimes better than scattershot low quality phrases

If you know of fifty possible phrases people use to search for your offerings, it may be better to only put your cost per click dollars into the higher performing or the more common phrases to one degree or another, rather than trying to spread your limited budget too thin. Alternatively, you might try and experiment for a couple months only going with less popular or less expensive phrases but more of them. Only your actual results will tell you how to proceed and what really works for your needs.

Ad Variations

Create a variety of ads, experimenting with the wording. And sometimes, changing the wording on an ad makes sense just because of the change of a season, or special promotions you run, or because of something happening in the news that relates to your products or services that your ad can speak to… Over time, you will be able to see which performs better as related to which keyword phrases.

___________________________________________________

Google or Yahoo or MSN

I will say this but it’s just my opinion- while Yahoo has it’s place, in my experience managing countless campaigns for clients all across the country, Google’s results far outshine those at Yahoo over and over again. Yahoo is actually much better suited to display advertising. But by all means, if you have a large enough marketing budget, put some money into both - building brands is always a good thing if you can aford it. MSN of course can possibly help, simply because of the eyeballs it reaches, but when dealing with percentages, most of my clients find the most success with Google.

___________________________________________________

How Big A Budget?

It’s also about having the ability to devote enough budget. For example, if you have less than $500 a month or $1,000 a month, or $5,000 a month, depending on the cost per click, if the daily portion gets used up early in the day, that means your ads may not be seen by the vast majority of people who might actually be your best prospects. So then you have to address that.

If your offering is geographically located, and you are trying to reach a specific market on the physical map, you’ll need to also work in geo-location techniques for more refined targeting.

Then there’s the issue of needing to be able to stay with it long enough to experiment with variations on phrases, variations on ad copy…

___________________________________________________

It’s as much an art as a science.

___________________________________________________

Determining success

Having the conversion code from Google or Yahoo on your site - on the confirmation page or the thank you for contacting us page is really one of the only ways to know what the ultimate cost is per conversion.

Having a site visitor trending solution such as Google Analytics on your site is also paramount to helping you refine things along the way as well. And you can tie Google Analytics in with conversion tracking for even more clarity.

___________________________________________________

Combine PPC and Organic for Best Results

On a final note, the absolute best success comes when you have PPC ads AND you rank very high on the first page of Google or Yahoo. People conducting a search that see your ad in both the sponsored area and organic listings does a great deal to build your brand identity and motivate more people to click on either based on whether they don’t mind clicking on a sponsored ad or they only click on organic listings…

It’s definitely possible to find success with enough footwork, but also only if once someone gets to your web site they stay and are drawn into your actual product or service offerings!